Stoughton surges into world final

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This article was published 09/04/2011 (5487 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

REGINA — For the third time in his life, Winnipeg’s Jeff Stoughton will curl for a world championship.

Team Canada’s Stoughton, with third Jon Mead, second Reid Carruthers and lead Steve Gould, defeated Scotland’s Tommy Brewster 5-2 in the Page playoff 1 vs. 2 game Friday night to advance to Sunday night’s final of the 2011 World Men’s Curling Championship.

It wasn’t a vintage win for the Canadians, who played well but unspectacularly and can ultimately thank for the victory a pair of easy misses by Brewster late in the game — the Scottish skip couldn’t draw the eight-foot with the last rock of the eighth end and then flashed an open hit in the ninth end to give Canada back-to-back steals.

Still, they award no points for style at this event and Stoughton is now going to be playing in his third world final in 15 years, having won the first one — in 1996 — and lost the second one — in 1999.

“It was a simple game,” said Stoughton, “but we made the right shots at the right time… It’s awesome, we’re super excited and it’s exactly where we want to be. One more win and we’re world champs — it’s going to be great.”

It was an uncharacteristically gritty victory for a Canadian team that has dominated its competition for much of this week, with the notable exception of a breakdown Thursday night in a lone loss to Norway on the final draw of the round robin.

If there were any lingering after-effects to that Norway loss, they weren’t noticeably on display Friday night. But it is also true that this was less than the superlative Team Canada that won their first 10 games straight in this event.

Stoughton struggled at times, missing the kind of shots he’d been making all week and shooting just 73 per cent through the first eight ends. A short angle runback attempt for three in the sixth end, for instance, was not even close. And the Canadians gift-wrapped a deuce for Scotland in the fifth end.

In the end, Stoughton finished with his second lowest shooting percentage of this entire event at 79 per cent.

But at the end of the day, it was impossible to be critical of a first-year team playing with a 47-year-old skip, a rookie second and a third who had all but given up on the game just a couple of years ago, after they advanced within a win of becoming the best men’s curling team on the planet.

And make no mistake — Stoughton made clear Friday night that only total victory would be acceptable this weekend when he was asked if there would be any consolation to be drawn from finishing as the second-best team in the world.

“That’s a good question,” replied Stoughton. “It’s nothing we want to experience. There is no consolation to being runner-up. It sucks and we don’t want to be that person. It’s a terrible feeling. We want to be the ones smiling on Sunday evening.”

Scotland will now play again in tonight’s semifinal against the winner of this afternoon’s Page playoff 3 vs. 4 game between Norway’s Thomas Ulsrud and Sweden’s Niklas Edin.

Brewster felt his young team played well enough to win against Canada and put the blame for the loss squarely on his own shoulders, “In a nutshell, we put ourselves in position and I didn’t play the shots that (mattered) unfortunately,” he said.

Stoughton said his team would make use of practice time both today and Sunday, in addition to enjoying some down time watching the Masters golf tournament. “It’s exactly what we were planning for this whole week. We got through this game and I think we’re going to be fire on Sunday night. We’re really looking forward to it.”

Facing elimination on Thursday night, Norway stole the tenth end against Canada to stay alive and advance to the playoff round. Stoughton was asked his thoughts on potentially now facing an Olympic silver medallist he had a chance to eliminate in Sunday’s final —  and who is the only team Canada hasn’t beaten here.

“I’d love to have Norway,” said Stoughton with a smile, “because then we can say we beat everyone in the field.”