Scotland go down to Russia after making a promising start

Scotland suffered their first loss in three starts when skip Tom Brewster and his team went down 6-9 to Russia in the fourth session of round-robin play in the World Men’s Curling Championship in Basel, Switzerland.

Earlier they had enjoyed two good successes, beating Korea 9-3 in their opener and following that up with a 6-3 win over Norway.

Against Russia, the damage was done largely in the fourth and sixth ends.

In the fourth, Russian skip Alexey Tselousov hit his last stone into a busy house to remove the one Scottish stone sitting in the collection, to score four for a 5-1 lead.

In the sixth, he played a double take-out for three shots and an 8-2 lead.

There was a brief Scottish fightback when Brewster played a double take-out in the ninth to score three and reduce Russia’s lead to 9-6.

The Scots were then run out of stones in the 10th end.

Afterwards, a disappointed Brewster said: “I’m still trying to figure out how that happened.

“We didn’t pick up on the stones or the ice and we weren’t throwing well enough to do so.

“Hopefully we can learn from that for later in the week, but it might come back to haunt us”.

The Scots have two games today, against Japan in the morning session and then Canada.