Another Scottish Over

So our blogging activities at the Co-operative Funeralcare Scottish Championships died a quick death, so sorry about that, I hope you all managed to survive without it!

Towards the end of the week, our curling shirts were not smelling very fresh. Having 3 identical shirts started to become an issue as the 'smell test' was the only way to accurately determine how many games it had been worn for, this was not a pleasant part of the day. Colin hooked us up with some washing powder so that people could stand within 10 feet of us again!

We are obviously not going to do a review of all the games, because I can not really remember what happened.

Our round robin wins were against;

Logan Gray
John Hamilton
Warwick Smith
Kyle Smith
Grant Hardie
Moray Combe
Ally Fraser

And the teams that managed to sneak a win against us were;

Ewan MacDonald
Lee McCleary.

So that left the table looking like this with us securing a place in the 1v2 game, which is much nicer than the 3v4 game.

But before all of that boring curling, here are a few things that happened at Horselea Lodge.

We were informed by the owner that the water to the Lodge would be shut off for a couple of hours due to maintenance work that had been scheduled. We were supposed to run the taps for a while before using it to make sure everything had gone OK. With Dave being up at the crack of dawn, he was first to try and have a shower. Remembering the instructions from the owner, he ran the taps for a couple minutes to be on the safe side. As there were no issues, he jumped in but quickly discovered there was a problem that he had not anticipated.

The rest of the guys in the house were awoken by a shrill scream coming from the shower as there had been an extremely powerful burst of scolding hot water that had pinned a naked and vulnerable David Edwards to the wall of the shower, unable to escape.

He eventually managed to peel himself off the wall and made it cagily to the power switch to stop the agony.

Despite all of this drama, Dave did well to gather himself and cook for us the entire week. Here is John sampling some of his finest work.

John enjoying Dave's homemade Chicken and Bacon Pie

We also discovered/were reminded how much of a messy bugger Scott is.

In the 1v2 against Ewan MacDonald, we lost a couple of 3's in the first half of the game which ended that campaign pretty early.

So once again, we were against Logan Gray in a semi final. We had not been successful in very many semi finals in the past, so we were keen to get through this one to make our first final as a team. It was a tight game, and to be honest, we were looking pretty screwed in the 10th end against Logan. It seemed like we were going to have to play a very tricky 15ft angle run back with Dave's last to keep our hopes alive. But fortunately Team Gray's last stone just rubbed a guard that opened up shot stone and gave us a hack weight tap for the victory. Dave played a good one that earned us a place in the final. So for the first time in a couple of years, we would wake up on the Sunday morning of the Scottish without the most brutal of hangovers! Hurraaaay!

So into the final it was against Ewan MacDonald!

The game was broadcast by the BBC, so you can catch the highlights of the match on ayePlayer HERE.

So it felt like it would have been quite a good game to watch, as there were a lot of stones in play most of the time.

As I am sure you already know, we ended up losing the game. The line score below shows how it all went down.

Who ever gave the score out to the papers, curlingzone and a few other places didn't manage it very well, as it looks like we got a proper thumping! We somehow managed to give up a steal of 3 in the last end, to lose 9-4, but that was not quite how I remember it going!

Dave scraping the barrel for tactical advice.

So we earned a silver medal. At the presentation we were given the wrong medals as Scott had been promoted to Ladies Coach Silver Medallist!

Correct medal

Ewan MacDonald's team played extremely well all week, and probably had one of the best performances by anyone in the Scottish Championships over the last 5 years.

They will certainly be competing for medals out in Beijing at the World's, so the best of luck to them!

That was the final competition of the season for us. It would have been very nice to get a win in the final of the Scottish, but it was not to be this time, so we will just have to try again next year!

Cheers
Team Edwards
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Scottish Championships - Sunday/Monday

On Sunday Team Edwards made their way to Perth for the practice at 7pm. We were quite organised this year and had sheets of paper with the curling head printed out on it and numbered stickers that we could use to match stones, because Dave is a geek.

Prior to that, Dave and Scott met the owner of the cottage that the team were going to be staying in so they could pick up the keys and get shown around. With John and Colin being absent, Dave and Scott quickly reserved a double bed each and let the weaker two share the twin room.

Dave had purchased £120 worth of food from Tesco to feed the team for the week which took a while to unload. John has high standards and this is most evident with the strict nutritional requirements that he sets himself to ensure he is able to perform to his fullest capacity. Dave was thankfully able to find the very specific cereal variety pack that John demanded.

John's breakfast

After the practice Dave did some cooking and the first meal he prepared was a sausage and bacon pasta with garlic bread which was very good.

Dave with his sausage

As well as very specific nutritional demands, John is also very picky about the crockery that he eats his meals from. There was a bit of an emergency when it was discovered that John had forgotten to pack his favourite plate for the week in Perth. Not to fear, he called his Mum and Dad told them to deliver the plate to our cottage ASAP so he could eat his meals in peace.

John's plate

So after all that drama we made our way to bed to prepare for the game against Warwick Smith the next morning. Here is the line score.

The game was quite close but stealing a two in the 7th end made things a bit simpler.

We then went back to the cottage for some food between games. After last year where every team member had a go at cooking, it looks like Dave has had enough of the sub standard meals that the rest of the team were producing and he will be doing the cooking for majority of the week, which we are certainly not complaining about! Dave produced a very good chicken curry this time.

Colin enjoying Dave's spicy meat.

This is how the game against Logan Gray went.

It was not a very high quality exhibition of curling but we managed to come out on top. That was our last game of the day so we had a beer at the rink and then some pizza back at the cottage.

In the morning John came in complaining that he had not had a warm shower for two days in a row. The rest of the team thought this was quite unusual as they all had lovely warm showers.

The boy had not discovered the magic switch that makes the water hot. Spacker.

Next up was Lee McCleary.

The game was alright and we played OK. We played a pretty good last end but Team McCleary made it tough for us and left Dave a very tricky through the port hit, that unfortunately wrecked.

We are now sitting on 2-1 with Ally Fraser to play this evening.

There is a fair jam for second place at the moment, but I am sure that will iron itself out by the end of the week.

Cheers
Team Edwards
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Scottish Men's Championships Preview

Following our disappointing run against women's teams, we are thankful to be heading down to the Dewar's Centre in Perth to compete in the Scottish Men's Championships, where we will not have to play any women at all!

The event once again has the morbid Co-operative Funeralcare as the title sponsor. Dying to get started.

Due to the World Championships being held in Beijing, it has been requested by the RCCC that all of the competitors turn up with their passports so visa applications can get sorted and the eventual winners get to smog central on time.

A view of the arena in Beijing? Maybe?

We are very pleased that the schedule makers of the Scottish Championships saw the light and decided to not mix the draw times of the games this year. Finishing a game at 11pm, getting home at midnight and then getting up at 6am the next day for an early game was brutal.

So this is when and who we line up against at the Scottish Championships.

Warwick Smith - Monday 10th February 12pm
Logan Gray - Monday 10th February 8 pm

Lee McCleary - Tuesday 11th February 12pm
Ally Fraser - Tuesday 11th February 8pm

Moray Combe - Wednesday 12th February 12pm
Ewan McDonald - Wednesday 12th February 8pm

Grant Hardie - Thursday 13th February 12pm
John Hamilton - Thursday 13th February 8pm

Kyle Smith Friday - 14th February 12pm

I don't actually know if 12 noon is AM or PM, but it says 12pm on the RCCC website, so that is good enough for us!

We have not played any of the teams in our opening 5 games of the Scottish, so hopefully they are all going to be rubbish.

We will be making our way down to Perth for the Sunday evening practise where we have 10 minutes on each sheet to figure out what the stones are doing. I am sure Dave will have some procedure set out to make it all go smoothly.

This year we are staying in Forgandenny which is 6.8 miles from the rink and will take 15 minutes to drive.

Making it easy for the groupies. 

We are staying at the self catering Horselea Holiday Cottages for the week, so there may be a repeat of last year where each member of the team is let loose in the kitchen.

How much of a mess can Scott make of this place?

"Horselea has two luxury 4 Star self catering cottages on a working farm.... an idyllic country retreat where guests can enjoy the delights of the beautiful surrounding farmland, stunning views of the Ochil and Sidlaw hills, and the Strathearn Valley."

Looking pretty good!

The cottage that we have booked for this year has four bedrooms and sleeps six, because we all know what Colin 'Shagger' Campbell is like!

Where Collie is in his element. 

Our appearance money from Russia has lasted well and we have not had to dish out any cash out to Dave 'the money hammer' Edwards for accommodation/entries over the last month. But unfortunately, that kitty is now dead.

We will try and get some blogging on the go during the championships, but it takes surprisingly longer than you would think to write. It also heavily depends on how much wifi is kicking about, we will try our best though!

Wish us luck!
Cheers
Team Edwards
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Bloody Women

We started the Petrofac Aberdeen City Open by drawing Alison Kinghorn in our opening game. Alison would be the first in a long line of women's teams that we would be playing over the course of the weekend.

For the first game, with Dave being absent, Derrick Sloan joined the team and slipped in at second. The game went pretty smoothly and we managed to win 15-2. Notable points from the game include John missing two opportunities for seven!

John, Scott and Colin decided they would head to Union Square for some spicy, chicken based nutrition at Nando's before their second game before against Jisun Kim from Korea. They have been training daily for hours and hours and hours at Curl Aberdeen over the last month in preparation for the Olympics, so they had a fair grasp of the ice conditions but will probably require reconstructive knee surgery following the Olympics.

Team Korea

Dave arrived prior to the game pleased to have learnt that John, Scott and Colin had survived without him, but his mood came crashing down when he discovered that he had been necknominated by 'Fat Sam Duncan Gracie'. I am not going to explain what necknominating is, because if you have facebook, you know.

For the game against Korea, it was pretty tight, but we had a moderate level of control throughout the game and managed to win by taking our point with the hammer in the eighth.

After the game, the team separated and made their way home. At about 11.30pm, Scott got a notification on Facebook stating that he had been tagged in a video by David Edwards. The bastard. The necknominating cycle had unsurprisingly began to make its way throughout the team. If you are keen to see Dave in a revealing amount of clothing downing a can of Caffrey's, go to his facebook page.

Dave in the midst of necknominating

Our Saturday morning game was a top of the table tie against Roy Haites. We managed to take a couple of threes early on that ensured qualification to the KO stages.

With Scott's 24 hour window for completing is necknomination looming, and with qualification guaranteed, he decided to get it out of the way between games. Dave, Colin and Scott made their way to Aberdeen Beach to film Scott's hauntingly pale body jump into the North Sea and down a pint. At this point, the nomination baton was passed onto Colin Campbell.

Scott would kill to be as tanned as this milk bottle

So for the third game of the weekend we would be up against some women and this time is was Hannah Fleming. We made a good start and took a 2 in the first end. Usually we make a nice effort at defending a lead, but this time we crumbled quite spectacularly. Over the next three ends we gave up 9 points........ which put us in a bit of a hole. Seven points down with 4 ends to go, we decided to hit through an end to take our 1 in the hope that we could get a couple of ends for the schenkel.

This is how the table looked at the end of the group games.

We were still top which was nice and it meant that we were lined up against Kerry Barr in the quarter final.

But before all that we had the evening entertainment that was organised at Curl Aberdeen to enjoy! We were seated with Susan Kesley's team that included honorary woman, Struan Wood. There was quite a lot of free wine on the go, so we got fair stuck into that. It was then for some reason suggested, that the dessert at the meal was to be eaten with out any cutlery at all, which obviously, got pretty messy.

After the dinner, there was the annual horse race. Below is the concept.

There were 6 rows of people sitting on chairs with a horse on wheels attached to a stick with a piece of string. The goal was to wind the string around the stick as quickly as possible to get the horse to your chair first.

As there was some big money on the line, Scott was put forward as the reigning champ to try and win the gamblers on the team some dough. Scott's well trained and powerful wrists eased through the first heat and secured his seat in the grand final.

There was some heavy bidding in the auction prior to the grand final. Scott came in as the most expensive horse and was purchased by Roy Haites for £130. That was some big confidence.

Although the grand final was closer, Scott still came through in first place and defended his title. This won Mr Haites a big wad of cash that the big man donated to charity. It also won Scott a bottle of Glayva that he definitely did not donate to charity.

It was off to bed to get some rest before for the quarter against Kerry Barr. We had played Kerry Barr once before this season which did not go well for us. Unfortunately it was much of the same this time as we did not produce our best performance. KB had a draw to the 8ft for the win in the extra which she made. That shot cost us over a thousand pounds as we dropped to second in the Scottish Curling Tour. Not ideal. Thankfully Kerry felt bad and let us know that she will be reimbursing us fully for her last shot. Cheers dude!

With us being knocked out in the quarter, it allowed us to enter the hotshots. Dave and Colin thought better of it and made their way home, but with John needing to pay for a new phone and Scott just generally being a poor student, they decided to enter the hotshots to try and win the £200 prize money.

The boys were top seeds going into the crazy 8's final. The final had the best four teams from the points section.

Team 1. John Penny/Scott Macleod
Team 2 Duncan Menzies/Thomas Halder
Team 3 The Russians
Team 4 The English

The aim of the hot shots was to remove all eight stones that were positioned in the formation below. After that, you had to get all eight of the yellow stones into the house. Who ever could do this the quickest would win.

JP and Scott managed it in a time of 2 minutes and 30 seconds which was the winning time! If you want to see a video of Scott falling on his arse, go 23 seconds into the bottom video on THIS PAGE.

In the main event, Ross McCleary lost the final to Grant Hardie. This meant Ross McCleary won the Scottish Curling Tour and Grant Hardie jumped up to 3rd.

Congratulations to them both!

Colin Campbell completed his necknomination by baring his hairy chest in his partially constructed bathroom which helped him recover from the two devastating defeats to girls. He passed the nomination onto John who completed the task the next day.

JP showed off his little pot belly in his joinery workshop and managed to down a pint quite impressively for a man that doesn't drink beer!

Cheers
Team Edwards
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