New Season

So the new season is nearly upon us and there have been a few things we have had to organise over the past few months. First of all is the competition schedule which is as follows;

03 Oct – 05 Oct               The Ice Bowl Open, Dumfries.

16 Oct – 19 Oct               Euro Playoffs, Perth.

07 Nov – 09 Nov              Edinburgh International. 

21 Nov – 23 Nov              Lockerbie Superspiel.

12 Dec – 14 Dec              Kinross Open.

19 Dec - 21 Dec               Dumfries CCT.

8 Jan – 11 Jan                 Perth Masters.

16 Jan - 18 Jan                Scottish Qualifiers Dumfries.

30 Jan – 1st Feb              Aberdeen City Open.

6 Feb - 8 Feb                   Scottish Qualifiers Braehead.

It looks as if we are going to be in the Dumfries/Lockerbie neck of the woods a lot this season! Nice and close....

This year, Team Edwards have sold out and managed to get a few sponsors on board to make the season a bit easier on the bank account. The sponsors we have secured are;

1) VG Energy

2) Don Valley

3) Ventrolla Tayside

We are going to shamelessly plug each of the sponsors at a rate of one sponsor per blog over the next few weeks. Today it is VG Energy's turn in the lime light!

VG Energy aim to make renewable energy technologies both easy to understand and affordable. They offer a complete all inclusive service for Biomass, Wind, and Solar PV installations and provide a complete turn-key service. 

So if you are really interested in a wind turbine, biomass boiler or solar PV system, mention TeamEdwards100 to receive a limited time discount on any purchase.

Click HERE to access the VG Energy site and get a far better idea of what the service they provide actually is. Each of the sponsors will appear on the right hand side of the Team Edwards blog over the season, so if you ever get the urge for windows, turf or a wind turbine, give them a click! 

With this new found investment in the team, we have decided to go a bit more upmarket with our kit and get some custom made gear from foxglide! Alan Mitchell sent us several options to choose from and the shirts below are the ones we have selected.

We only finalised the order last week so we have not got the shirts yet, but we would recommend people to use foxglide with the service that has been provided so far!

So the first competition that these shirts will see some action is The Sulwath Open in Dumfries next weekend. This will also be our first time on the ice as a team and our only competition before the European Play-offs. Below is the draw.

Our group games are as follows;

Friday 5th October 5.30pm vs Jamie Malton

Saturday 6th October 11.30am vs China

Saturday 6th October 4.30pm vs Graeme Adam

If we manage to qualify out the section, we are really hoping we don't run into the women's section in the quarter finals, as it will more than likely be the end of the weekend for us!

I am sure you will have all heard of Jessica Ennis-Hill, Jenson Button and Rory McIlroy. One thing they all have in common is that they are sponsored by the large Spanish bank, Santander. When we were looking for some sponsorship a couple of months ago, Billy contacted a guy he knew at the bank and asked about getting some cash. Billy's contact said they give all their sponsorship money to the three people listed above. Fair enough, they will probably get the bank a bit more exposure than Team Edwards on the Scottish Curling Tour. A couple days later, Billy received a package with a note saying, "Sorry we couldn't give you any money but here is a signed Rory McIlroy hat, Jenson Button helmet and a Jessica Ennis-Hill t-shirt". All the gear is shown below. 

  

The flowerpot is not included. 

So we do not really have any idea what to do with this stuff but we are still grateful for it anyway! We will maybe do some kind of raffle or auction. If anyone wants to make an offer, give us a shout and we will see what we can do! If you are lucky, we may even throw in a signed John Penny green Team Edwards shirt as worn by the man himself in the C road semi final of the 2012 Perth Masters. That should really sweeten the deal. 

Cheers
Team Edwards
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Summer Update

So the last time you would have heard from us was during the run up to the Scottish Mixed Championship where Dave & Colin and John & Scott played on separate teams. 

Both teams were drawn in the same section so this meant that a pretty massive derby was planned for Friday evening between the two. It was a tight game with the most memorable shot coming from John Penny that made him look like an absolute fool. This was achieved with a shot that I can only ever remember seeing once before, way back in 2004 by an U17 junior girls team in Lockerbie. John Penny actually managed to 'take his one' when playing a THROW THROUGH FOR A BLANK. There is a wee diagram below showing how he actually managed to do this. 

John Penny is a fool.

Despite this ridiculously amateur error, John's team managed to come out victorious over the old boys. The standings in the group were extremely tight with Dave, John and Ewan MacDonald tied for first; through some kind of draw shot ranking/bribery of officials, Dave managed to get the automatic berth in the semi final. JP's team were up against Ewan's loaded team of reigning champs in a 4 end play off to qualify. JP and co were in a bit of a hole being 3 down after 2 ends. The team managed to claw it back and take it to an extra where JP redeemed himself slightly with a pretty phenomenal last shot to set up the steal in the extra. Below is Pye's edited footage of the shot.

After that, it was onwards to the semi finals where Mr Edwards was downed by Kyle Smith but JP's team snuck by Dave Mundell for a place in the final. 

The scoreline in the final against Kyle was actually quite close, but in all honestly, we were absolutely blown off the park. We had to settle for our silver medals this time round. 

Runners-up

So congratulations to Kyle Smith, Hannah Fleming, Billy Morton and the other one that was playing!

The champs sweeping hard and looking natural.

So in a pretty tedious link, I am sure that the majority of you will have already heard that we have made a switch at the lead position with Colin Campbell leaving and Billy Morton coming in. It has been a great few years playing with Colin and although he is taking it easy in terms of curling this winter, we wish him all the best in the future. 

Some of you will maybe not know Billy, so here is a wee introduction.

Billy Morton - Profile

Billy aspires to be a model.

Position: Lead

Hometown: Galston
Resides: Glasgow
Occupation: Farmer
DOB: 15 April 1991
Relationship Status: "Single"

Billy has played with Grant Hardie for the last few seasons but has experience of playing with some members of our team before as he won the 2011 Scottish Juniors with John. Their junior team were also taken under the wing and "guided" through the season by the one and only Greig Henderson, so that will thankfully not be a shock to the system for Billy.

JP and Bill winning the 2011 Scottish Junior Championship. They have both been banned from selecting team trousers because of this.

Both Scott and Billy played in the Stirling Summer Skins last weekend trying to emulate David Edwards' success last season in lifting the trophy. Both didn't make it past the quarters finals which was not too disappointing. There were some bloody late nights. 

Fubar team bonding.

David Edwards was unable to defend his Stirling Skins title this year as he is whipped and has a baby. The news so far from the Edwards household is that the baby is not ginger and looks more like Louise, so good news all round!

Dave looking athletic petting a dolphin.

So this year we are looking to do something that we have never ever done before, and that is play well at the start of the season. We have been invited to participate in the European Playoffs which I have been told include Ewan MacDonald, David Murdoch and Tom Brewster. These will take place in Perth at the end of October. We will only have one event as a team prior to this competition but we will hopefully not have to face any of our standard early season woes as we will not be nursing tremendous hangovers through quarter finals against women's team.

That is it for now,
Cheers
Team Edwards
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Scottish Mixed Championships

So we lied about the previous post being the last one of the season, but I had forgotten about a very important competition!

With the competitive men's season now over, we had to find some women to have a go at winning the Scottish Mixed which is being held at Curl Aberdeen this weekend. David Edwards and Colin Campbell have ditched the younger and stronger members of the team for some more experienced ladies closer to their age range. Last week John Penny and Scott Macleod got the call to team up with two previous European Mixed Gold Medallists, so there wass no way they could turn that down!

So here are the line ups.

TEAM EDWARDS
S - David Edwards
3 - Susan Kesley
2 - Colin Campbell
1 - Fran Stretton

TEAM BREWSTER
S - John Penny
3 - Kim Brewster
2 - Scott Macleod
1 - Karen Barthelemy

With John being the only memeber in his team to have not won the Scottish Mixed before, his position at skip is on a very shoogly peg.

And these are the groups.

Section B is pretty stacked with 66% of the field having someone who has won the Euro Mixed in the last 10 years.

So, as you can see, there is going to be a MASSIVE inter Team Edwards derby. It is scheduled to go down at 7.30pm on Friday night, so come in and witness the event, as there is almost certainly going to be a brawl.

So the big question is, who is your money on for the Friday night classic!!??

The rest of the games will go ahead at the following times.

Friday 7th March - 3pm
Friday 7th March - 7.30pm

Saturday 8th March - 9am
Saturday 8th March - 1.30pm
Saturday 8th March - 6pm

As the numbers for the event are down slightly this year, only two teams from each section will qualify for the KO stages, so that is where we need to be!

Information and results will probably be on the RCCC website HERE.

Thats it,
Cheers
Team Edwards
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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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