Mens Qualifiers

 We made it through to Scottish Mens Finals! The group is shown below.

We did not have the most convincing of qualifications. It was pretty ropey at times.

A picture of some rope.

I will now give you all a 2 sentence summary of each game.

Lose - Graeme Black 3-6

Graeme played a lot of shots and we did not. By far our worst game of the qualifiers.

The Bye

We went on a team date to watch Sherlock Holmes. Very romantic.

Win - Alan Manuel 9-3

We also did not play very well. Won it without too many issues.

Lose - Logan Gray 4-6

This was a really good game. Unfortunately for us Logan was being a bit of a dick and kept making ridiculous shots.

Win - Alan Gillies 6-5

We were toiling for a while. Had to make a wee bit of a comeback.

Win - Dave Hay 10-3

We could have quite easily been 5-0 down after the first 2 ends. Mr Edwards was on form, so it was all good.

Lose - Ally Fraser 4-5

Played really well, but it was a defensive game, so it was tight until the end. Had the 4ft for the win, and missed.

Win – Graeme Shedden 9-0

Was not a classic from Shedden. We stole quite a lot of ends.

Win – Bruce Mouat 8-2

Took a 3 in the first. I had some fun peeling following that.

This left us on a 6-3 record. Because all the other results went our way, we got through without any tie breakers! It looked like we could have been there for weeks if we had lost the last one. There was a possibility of a 5 way tiebreaker for one spot.

The draw for the Mens Finals is now out.

http://royalcaledoniancurlingclub.org/competitions/scottish-mens-championship/

This is how it looks for us.

13^th Feb 4.15pm MacDonald

14^th Feb 8.00am McWilliam

14^th Feb 4.00pm Murdoch

15^th Feb 12noon Black

15^th Feb 8.00pm Smith

16^th Feb 12noon Young

16^th Feb  8.00pm Gray

17^th Feb  8.00am Hamilton

17^th Feb  4.00pm Brewster

The 8pm game followed by an 8am game is going to be pretty rough. I am sure we will manage though.

That’s it.

Cheers

Team Edwards

Perth Masters

 Here is what happened at the Masters

First game was against Tsoulesov from Russia. He was amazing at blanking so it was a very tight game until the 5^th end. He went mental in the 6^th and tapped us up for a steal of two. We won.

A rare time when we had stones in play

Following this was the Calcutta. We fancied buying ourselves but someone else was determined to get us. We sold for £190 in the end.  

Next up was Laycock from Saskatchewan. They are a pretty good team. It was tight the whole way and it went to an extra. They hogged a few guards so we had a pretty simple shot for the win.

Chasing John's Peel

We had Brewster in the A semi. I think he had received a bit of coaching from the Russian we played earlier. It was an insanely boring game until we open freshed, and lost a 2. Following that, we didn’t make very many shots and ended up getting beaten 5-0.

We then played Sandy Reid. It was a pretty good game for a while. We had a few chances that didn’t come off, especially in the 4^th end. So in the 5^th end, we decided we really wanted a 2. What we actually did was give up a steal of 3. Hello C Road.

Team Edwards Hairline

Next was Pascal Hess from Switzerland. We played really well at the start of the game and had a few chances that did not get us anything.  We were 3-1 down in the 4^th.  We took our 2 in the 5^th, then forced 1, then scraped together a 3 and then didn’t lose a 2 in the 8^th. So we won.

We played Kyle Smith’s team of children for a place in the C final. We were 3-0 up after the first couple of ends. We had a pretty awful pick/burn combo that ended with us losing a very unjustified 3. After that, they played really good and we played bad. So we lost and were out.

Giving it the guns.

Conclusion of the weekend.

We are amazing at playing foreign people. Not so good against Scottish. Sooooooooooooo, as of tomorrow we are starting the Qualifying for the Scottish Finals, this will be mostly against Scottish teams. First up is Mr. Graeme Black at 12.45pm Saturday. On Sunday we have Alan Manuel first and the Logan Gray at 8.00pm.

I am very keen to be playing Mens Finals this year, so, once again, wish us luck!

Love

Team Edwards

Follow us on Twitter at the links below.

https://twitter.com/#!/TeamDEdwards

https://twitter.com/#!/granitecitydave

https://twitter.com/#!/scottmacleod1

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

European Mixed and Champery

Well we never really did a final European Mixed blog. There were other priorities.

In a quick rundown of what actually happened in the competition - Switzerland beat Germany in the final and got a well deserved gold medal. In the bronze game, the Czech Republic beat Denmark in a close game.

Anyway, here is the official photo of us looking smart in the very well tailored blue blazers.

The Closing Banquet was extremely good. Especially when the food came. I don’t want to be too dramatic, but I was very close to death through famine. Bob Geldof was even on the phone asking if I wanted him to organise another Band Aid. I turned down the offer. 

One of the highlights of the banquet was a Spanish man dancing. Might sound unusual, but it was very funny and I am sure anyone who attended will agree. It did get quite freaky when he was half naked and a Czech guy was whipping him with a belt.... but it was all good!

The old husband and wife couple made the choice to go back to the hotel on the last set of buses. This was at 1am and we had to leave for our flight at 5am. Myself and Kerry were not so wise and stayed until the death. I was back in the hotel for 3am thanks to Eric – had a solid 90mins sleep – packed everything in the room – then left. If you guessed the following 7 hours in airports/aeroplanes followed by 2 hours of driving was not going to be a pleasant experience, you would be correct. When I arrived home, I realised that I had made a really really really good job of packing and had acquired a Phillips TV control from the hotel. Thankfully, the room was on David’s credit card.

That was the European Mixed. It was fun.

Next weekend we are away to Champery, Switzerland. This time we have Colin and John  back. We are in a group of 5 teams, the top team qualifies for the QF with the second place team having to go through playoffs if they want to make the money. Our group includes Edin(SWE), Pescia(SUI), Sik(CZE), Kirikov(RUS). Tough group, but we will see what we can do.

This is the website. http://www.curling-masters.ch/

Wish us luck.

Good day,

Team Edwards

EMCC 2011 Copenhagen - Thursday

This morning we had an early start for the first time this week and the girls had us up at the crack of dawn.  Well they tried, but being stereotypical males we left it to the very last minute before we dragged ourselves out of our pit and down to breakfast.  Needless to say Louise was tapping the table in reception like she had to be somewhere while we finished off our breakfast with plenty of man time in hand.

The caveman in Dave and Scott came out this morning when it was time to get up

Now I don’t really like talking too much about the games, but we saw something in this morning’s game against Russia that I’ve never witnessed before.  Having played a yellow stone they tried to take it back down the ice and play it in place of another stone that apparently had a crack on the running band?!?  Kerry was straight on the case and with a face like thunder escorted the stone back up the ice much to their surprise.  I stayed out of it for probably the first time in my life and let the umpire rule that they had to play all eight stones during an end.  In the end the guys made look good by leaving me a run back double in the 8^th end to open everything up and when the Russian stuffed his draw through the back we just had to hit the paint for the win. 

Scott should have been an artist with skills like this describing the triple in the 8th.

It’s now time for me to highlight Kerry’s quality moment of the day, which relates to the big cheques on display in Tarnby ice rink.  Having spotted one of these cheques Kerry comes out with a classic, “Having a cheque for that much money would you just not cash it?”.

The owners of this cheque have obviously been careless leaving it lying around!

Lunch today was quite funny as Scott’s order, a number 90 for Louise was mistaken for a number 19.  Now I’d just like to highlight that a number 90 is a children’s portion of tomato spaghetti!  Instead she ended up with a tuna and prawn pizza, which wasn’t ideal given she’s not a fan of either.  Face tripping her she managed to force down two slices with the topping scraped off before conceding defeat and leaving it for the boys supper this evening.

We won this evenings game against Spain although they made us work really hard for it.  The first couple of ends weren’t going to plan as they came out with all guns blazing, but we stuck in there and eventually the tide turned.  There was a little controversy in the 7^th end when the Spanish burnt a rock, but we decided to replace everything as it seemed the fairest thing to do.  The steal of two in this end proved the decider in the game.

We’ve had a little less time today and tomorrow so apologies if the blog updates dry up a little or become much shorter.

It’s the old man’s 60^th birthday tomorrow so we’re heading out for a meal at the Italian round the corner with the Scotland fans we found at the ice rink.

We finish off the round robin against Norway and Romania at 8.30am and 4pm tomorrow.

Vi ses!

EMCC 2011 Copenhagen - Wednesday

Well to coin a now famous Iain Dowie phrase, we got up this morning looking for bouncebackability against Sweden.  Thankfully we came out of the traps like a greyhound chasing a rabbit, and score 2's in the 1st and 3rd ends to secure a 4-1 lead at the break.  We decided to spend the next 4 ends hitting some red handled granite very hard and secured a 6-2 win in the end.

Kerry spent yesterday in the city centre with her mum and it appears they spent most of the day tracking down Scotland fans in Copenhagen.  During their visit they went to the see the Little Mermaid and Queen Margrethe II.  I don’t think they were invited in for afternoon tea and cake with the queen, but apparently the place was swarming with Scotland fans.  Great you might think, but then comes the sudden realization that the Scotland fans are infact the Danish Royal guards.

"The Scotland Fans"

At least Kerry and Jane managed to successfully navigate Copenhagen on the Metro, which is more than can be said for my parents who really should be fitted with a tracking beacon.  Scott’s parents arrived yesterday and he was happy to hear his mum and dad had made it out here safe and sound.  He was a little less happy when his mum announced that their accommodation was right next to a swingers club.

We found this lot at the ice rink. and we think they're supporting us?!?

The lads decided to make up for the food they missed on Monday evening by eating enough for a family of 10 between them at lunch today.

Scott and his Copenhagen version of a bargin bucket

Apparently Scott had seen smaller babies than Dave's calzone!

We’ve spent a few hours here and there with the various members of team Ireland and they’re really good craic, although James does seem to spend a heck of a time in the bath.  We're just heading off to support them in this evenings game as they had a tough one this morning and we wish them the best of luck tonight.  I’m going to share a little story they told us last night about one of their teammates. Picture the scene you’ve one of these nice new shiny bathrooms with one of these new fangled taps that operates both your shower and sink.  You’ve just had a shower, got dressed and need to clean your teeth before you head off for today’s adventures at Tarnby ice rink.  Then there’s this horrible realization that you’ve turned on the tap while cleaning your teeth only to find that the water isn’t coming out of the tap and you suddenly think you’re standing outside in the rain.  I won’t name the individual, but I have been advised that they’ve soaked themselves more than once!

It’s been a long old week out here with only one game a day so far, but for the next two days we have two games, which we're all looking forward to.  Russia and Spain are on the agenda for tomorrow so fingers crossed we can push on from the positive result today.

Vi ses!

EMCC 2011 Copenhagen - Tuesday

Well I woke up this morning to be told by Scott that I had been shouting “for god’s sake stop the screaming” during my sleep last night.  Maybe I was thinking about the noise Scott was going to make if I started to eat him given how hungry I was after missing tea last night.  I’ve never been so excited to have two bits of toast and a spoonful of beans on my plate this morning.  I do have a picture, but I may have to add this at a later date as the camera is on tour this evening.

The Diary of a Wimpy Kid was this mornings light entertainment movie before the game at 12pm.  If you love a bit of thoughtless humour I can definitely recommend it although I’m not sure it would be up there in Barry Norman’s all time greats, but it was a worth a watch if you’ve nothing better to do.

The game didn’t really go to plan today although all credit to the Dutch team who played really well throughout the match.  We were all square coming home and had a half stone peel to win the match.  Unfortunately I was a little tight and the target stone jammed on a back stone having removed another of our counters.  It wasn’t a great performance today so we’ll just need to make sure we bounce back tomorrow. 

If the RCCC are reading this, we may have to put in a request for some bigger shirts for “the destroyer” Macleod.  Apparently he can feel his shirts getting tighter after each sweeping effort.

The girls went into town with the parents after the game, and the lads went to the Italian for a Chimichanga before hitting the gym.  These Chimichanga things really are magnificent!

Today's lunch yummy!!!

I have to be honest the gym was a little scary this evening as we seemed to be training with some Mr Universe wannabes.  We obviously didn’t feel out of place being such muscular specimens ourselves, but these guys really were Ronnie Coleman look alikes!

Ronnie : Models himself on Scott and Dave

Scott has just announced this evening that he’s been eyeing up the men (honestly he did say that!) so I may go to sleep with one eye open this evening.

Sweden up tomorrow at 12pm Danish time (11am UK time).

Vi ses!