The Scotsman

High-flying Mouat ready for another switch of discipline­s in Ontario

- CURLING

After another run to the latter stages of a Grand Slam event, Bruce Mouat has made a near 2000-kilometre trip across Canada to rejoin his regular teammates as they prepare for the defence of their Masters title against the world’s best teams in Oakville, Ontario.

Less than 48 hours after he and Jen Dodds contested the semi-final of the Winnipeg Open Mixed Doubles on Sunday, Mouat is due to be back in action alongside Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy Mcmillan at the scene of one of the victories that helped them become the first ever Scottish winners of The Pinty’s Cup as theleading­teamingran­dslam events last season.

Their defence of that title got off to a difficult start as they were forced to re-shuffle their line-up for The National and The Tour Challenge in October due to a serious hand injury suffered by powerhouse sweeper Lammie.

However, they demonstrat­ed that they were back to something close to the form which also took them to the top of the world rankings for the first time at the beginning of this year when they completed a hat-trick of European Championsh­ips title wins on their third appearance at that event and believe they are now ready to show what they are capable of once more.

“We’re looking forward to getting going in Oakville and trying to re-create what we did last year when we won the event,” said Mouat. “I’m really excited to see what we can do with the boys this week. Coming off the Europeans the morale in the team is pretty high.

“With our slower start to our season, having the European Championsh­ips towards the end of the first half of the season it meant a lot for us to really go out and show that we are a really strong team and moving back to world number three is very encouragin­g for us because we had been falling a little at the start of the season.

“So I’m glad we got some ranking points at the Europeans and are climbing a wee bit again. We’ve got a tough few games this week, so we’ve got to try to focus on re-creating what we did at the Europeans and that will hopefully see us win a few games.”

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