Season Update, Perth Masters

SEASON UPDATE!!

We have completely abandoned the blog recently. I will restart it now in time for the business end of the season.

I will begin with an update with what has happened throughout the hiatus.

CHAMPERY

Champery is a cool place. It is a very small skiing town high up in Switzerland near the French border. It was about an hour and a half drive around Lake Geneva from the airport, most of it on a very steep small winding road.

The competition took place in the arena where the 2010 European Championships were held. It had big swing.

Our section contained Pescia, Kirikov, Sik and Edin. We beat Pescia, lost a bad one to Kirikov, won relatively pain free against Sik then had a tight one against Edin, which we lost. This left us on 2-2, that tied us for 2^nd place with Pescia. We had a better draw shot than him so we were through to the tiebreakers.  In our first game we played Ulsrud, which we won by taking a 4 in the 6^th end.  It ended 7-2 if my memory serves me correctly. Next up was De Cruz for a place in the Quarters. We got absolutely raped. Lost a 3 in the first then gave up a steal of 4 in the second. Game Over, Competition Over. De Cruz ended up winning competition beating Brewster in the final.

EUROPEAN PLAYOFFS

Next up were the Euro Playoffs in Perth.

The format was a four team double round robin to decide the two qualifiers in a best of three final.

This was how the first four games went

Brewster – Lose

Murdoch – Lose

Reid – Lose

Brewster- Lose

You would be forgiven for thinking that at this point, we were fucked.  We managed to win our last two RR games against Reid and Murdoch. This led to the table looking like this.

Brewster 6-0

Murdoch 2-4

Edwards 2-4

Reid 2-4

Very lucky. We were ranked 2^nd out of the teams tied on 2-4. We played Reid in our first and won. This meant we played Murdoch for a place in the final. It was a tight game and we had a few opportunities at the start. We had a bad end in the 6^th/7^th? and we were required to make a freeze to not give up 3. We came up short, lost the 3 and the game.

Murdoch played Brewster in the best of three final. Murdoch won. Stinger.

Dave got to go with Murdoch to Russia as 5^th man. The ice was really good for the weekend in Perth. Hopefully more of the same over the coming months!

EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL

At the end of November we played the International at Murrayfield Ice Rink. We were given a bit of a tough group. It included David Murdoch, David Hay, Jiri Snitil, Jan Hauser and Graeme Shedden. We played well and managed to win them all to come through top. This meant we played Logan Gray in the Quarter Final on the Sunday morning. They played well and we lost a very bad 3 early, this put us on the back foot for the rest of the game. We clawed it back a bit and made Logan draw the 8ft for the win. I cant remember all of the results following that but Tom Brewster beat Sandy Reid in the final.

We had a month free of competitions in December. Dave was away in Russia for most of it, but we all met up in Curl Aberdeen for a day of team practices. We are really good at curling now.  

The first half of the season was good. We had a bit of a jet set life travelling across Europe to Norway, Denmark and Switzerland. But now we get to curl in Perth all the time. Very exotic.

Next up is the Mercure Perth Masters.  We play our first game on Thursday 5^th January against Alexey Tselousov from Russia. If you are feeling a bit flush with cash you can come and buy us in the Calcutta on the Thursday Evening.

Here is the link to the draw.

http://www.perthmasters.com/draw.html   

Following this we have two weekends of Qualifiers for the Scottish Championships. If all goes well there we then have Scottish Finals in the middle of February for the right to represent Scotland at the World Championships in April.

Wish us luck.

Cheers

Team Edwards