Muirhead warms up for Moscow in style

Perth’s Eve Muirhead had two wins over the Kilmarnock team of Sarah Reid to finish four days of play in Scotland’s European qualifying tournament at Perth undefeated.

Along with her team-mates Claire Hamilton, Vicki Adams and Anna Sloan, she now goes on to represent Scotland at December’s European Championships in Moscow.

The Kilmarnock team had the body-blow of having to substitute their ill skip Reid with Kerry Barr yesterday morning, and they were out-played by Muirhead’s team throughout, going down by 5-9 in their morning game before losing the best-of-three series with an 8-5 afternoon defeat.

Afterwards, Muirhead said: “We started the weekend strongly and then continued that for eight good wins.” With a different team, Muirhead gained silver at last year’s European Championships and, looking forward, she said: “It’s not going to be easy. This is a new team so we’re just going to take this year’s Europeans as it comes.”

By contrast, the men’s best-of-three final between Scottish champion Tom Brewster from Aberdeen and Lockerbie’s two-times world champion David Murdoch was much tighter. It took an umpire’s measure to give Brewster a tenth-end steal of one for a 6-5 win yesterday morning, but Brewster lost the afternoon game 7-4 to Murdoch, finishing with a precision double take-out that ran Brewster out of stones. The encounter now goes to a third, winner-takes-all game.