Curling: Tom Brewster retains title as Eve Muirhead completes treble

Published on Monday 20 February 2012 00:00

TOM Brewster and his Aberdeen team retained their national title with a 5-2 win over Perth’s David Smith, while Perth’s Eve Muirhead landed her third national crown when her European champions beat Stranraer’s Gail Munro 9-3 in the women’s final of the Co-operative Funeralcare Scottish Championships in Perth yesterday.

After the teams swapped singles in the first two ends of the women’s game, Muirhead scored two in the third end for a two-shot lead, which she doubled with a steal of two more shots in the fourth when Munro’s last shot wrecked to push the score to 5-1 in Muirhead’s favour.

After blanking the sixth, Munro came back with a single in the sixth, but a precision take-out around guards with her first stone eventually allowed Muirhead the luxury of a straight nose-hit for four shots in the seventh. When Munro could only score one in the eighth, she conceded a lost cause.

Afterwards, Muirhead said: “We knew if we played the way we can we’d win, and we played great. We knew what we had to do and it wasn’t going to be easy because Gail is one of those players that you can never write off. You go into events like this with a massive target on your back and everyone’s there to beat you, especially as we’re current European champions.”

Muirhead and her team of Anna Sloan, Vickie Adams and Claire Hamilton now go on to represent Scotland at the Ford World Women’s Championship in Lethbridge, Canada next month.

The men’s final was a cagey affair, with six blank ends in total. However, Brewster got the first break when Perth’s fourth player Warwick Smith came up short with his final draw and handed Brewster a steal of two. After three blank ends, Smith made up for his earlier mistake by playing a brave promote on his own stone to knock out two Brewster stones, score two and level the game.

Brewster took the lead again in the eighth with a delicate split on two front stones to nudge one of them and his own shooter in for another two.

Smith was then forced to blank the ninth and then, in the tenth, good play by Brewster’s team left Smith with an impossible double attempt to level and instead let Brewster steal another single for the win that gave his team of Greg Drummond, Scott Andrewes and Michael Goodfellow their second successive title.

After the game, Brewster said: “Winning last year gave us such confidence this year. We knew how to come out and play and which shots we had to play. Even though Smith’s team don’t play a lot, they’re still good curlers”.

Thinking about his break-through as early as the third end, he added: “Yes, it was a long game, and it was a long week. We had a poor start this week, but we kept to our game-plan. It was just a case of making sure we had the hammer down the last or being two up, and that’s what we did”.

Brewster’s team now go on to represent Scotland at this year’s World Championships in Basel in April, hoping to go one better than the world silver they won last year.

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