His frustration was evident after he handed B.C.'s Bob Ursel a steal of three in the first end, but 2006 Olympic gold medallist Brad Gushue of Newfoundland and Labrador knew in the big picture his Brier effort was flawed.
Gushue bowed out of the 2008 Canadian men's championship after an 8-6 defeat in Friday morning's fourth-place tiebreaker game at MTS Centre.
"We've got some work to do," Gushue said after a 7-4 round-robin record. "We need to get better."
By his own admission, the 2007 Brier finalist -- he lost the title game to Ontario's Glenn Howard -- has followed that performance with a rocky season.
"(This Brier was) one of the many poor ones," Gushue said. "We've been very streaky. We've had some real good weeks and some real bad weeks.. This was a bad week but we scraped out a lot of wins we probably shouldn't have had.
"The positive we'll take from this is that we never gave up. To play as poorly as did and to get to a tiebreaker in this field is OK."
Gushue insisted that his Brier week was not ruined by starting off with losses to Saskatchewan, then Ontario.
"It wasn't that big a deal early, to lose to those two teams, " he said. "It just meant we'd have a lot less room for error."
And it was the same in the tiebreaker. Facing three B.C. stones all in the four-foot, Gushue's final draw to try to salvage one slipped about a foot too far. A hurled broom and water bottle followed during the television time out.
Gushue said he was not worried in the least when the rock left his hand.
"Not at all," he said. "It was the weight we wanted, we had talked about it and Chris (Schille, second) and Dave (Noftall, lead) got on it early a little bit and said it had to go. I didn't mind that too much because I thought it would slide and halfway down the sheet they stopped sweeping, then they got on it again and I thought, 'OK, it's perfect.' I was very surprised to see it slide to the back of the eight foot."
From there, it was an uphill battle and Gushue could never draw even.
"That was the story all week and then we fought tooth and nail to come back, then we had a couple of ends not get set up," he said. "When you're down 3-0, you need every end and we wasted a couple out there.
"That game, when Jim (Cotter, B.C. third) missed the draw in five, it actually felt like we could come back. We had some serious momentum there and had a nice deuce. All we needed was two in 10 to go to 11 and I really like our chances in stealing with that momentum, so it was disappointing not to get (an early) guard in the right place."
tim.campbell@freepress.mb.ca
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