Scots rally to win bronze after gold medal hopes swept away

The Scottish women picked the wrong time to lose their 100 per cent record at the Le Gruyère AOP European Curling Championships in '¨Glasgow when they suffered an 11-6 defeat by Russia in yesterday's semi-final.

Scotland celebrate winning bronze at the European Curling Championships at Braehead. Picture: Paul Devlin/SNS

The defeat meant the Scots missed out on the chance to play in today’s gold medal game at the Braehead Arena.

Eve Muirhead’s rink had gone through the round-robin matches undefeated and went on to the ice as favourites to reach the final.

However, they recovered later to beat the Czech Republic by 6-2 to win the bronze medals. In doing so, skip Muirhead and third player Anna Sloan set a new record of winning medals at seven consecutive Championships. The Scots were always in control in the game against the Czechs. They opened with a single score and stole another single point in the second to establish a cushion. The Scots eventually went into the half-time break with a 4-2 lead and finished the game off by running the Czechs out of stones in the tenth end, to record their 6-2 win.

Muirhead said: “We’re delighted. To come out and get a medal was our goal at the start of the week – and seven consecutive medals is pretty special – it’s not the colour we wanted, but we fought hard for that bronze medal. For the overall week to play 11 and won ten and come away with the bronze – we’re delighted to come out tonight and play those pressure games. I was absolutely gutted earlier on but that says a lot about our resilience and mental strength to come back out and get that medal.”

Earlier, the Scots lost to Russia. At the start of this game Russia stole two points, although the Scots responded immediately with two shots in the second to level at 2-2.

But, in the third end, Russian skip Victoria Moiseeva hit out a Scottish stone to score three points and take a 5-2 lead. The Scots responded in the fourth end when Muirhead drew her last stone on to the button to count two points and reduce Russia’s lead to 5-4.

In the sixth end, Moiseeva had another hit for three points, this time extending her lead to 8-4. After another two from Scotland in the seventh, she repeated this in the eighth end – another hit, another three points, this time to lead 11-6 and force the Scots to concede. Muirhead said: “We just got outplayed there and personally I didn’t have the best game.”