Homan survives late push from Black

HALIFAX — With her hometown crowd roaring, Christina Black was grinning ear to ear as she slid down the ice to take her final shot.

Trailing by two with the hammer, the underdog from Halifax stared down a cluttered house that featured a narrow opening to score three to steal Game 1 of the Canadian Curling Trials from heavily favoured Rachel Homan.

But Black ran out of magic. The misfire allowed Ottawa’s Homan to escape the scare and win 5-4.

Game 2 is set for 11 a.m. CT on Saturday.

“We kept it within striking distance going into the 10th, just hoping we’d have an opportunity to score two or score three and we were setting it up pretty good, but I just don’t think my shot was possible unless I could throw it a lot harder,” said Black.

“We gave it a run, though.”

Homan led 4-1 going into the seventh.

“We’re resilient. We said let’s scratch and claw our way back into this thing — that’s what we told each other at the fifth-end break,” said Black. “And we said, ‘Let’s just be annoying. Just don’t give up, just annoy them and see what happens’ and that’s what we did, and we were able to bring it down to the last rock.”

Neither skip had their best stuff as both Homan and Black curled at 74 per cent. The playing conditions didn’t help anyone with frost being an issue.

“Definitely challenging. The ice kept changing and was tough to keep up with,” said Homan. “But I thought we stayed really tough together. I thought we made a ton of shots and we were as precise as we could be. I thought we had an OK game, it needed to be a little bit sharper, and hopefully a few things change tomorrow.”

As the No. 1-seed, Team Homan had  Thursday off. Meanwhile, Black was busy outduelling Gimli’s Kerri Einarson 6-3 in the semifinal.

Black, ranked 27th in the world, falls to 1-7 all-time against Homan. Friday’s performance proved that she can at least make this three-game series interesting.

“You can’t let them get a lead. They’re so good,” said Black.

“We need to keep the game just a little bit closer tomorrow and give ourselves a better chance to pull it off.”

Homan, the top-ranked foursome in the world, is now 87-3 against Canadian teams since the start of the 2023-24 season.

“I think we’ve been in a lot of close games,” said Team Homan second Emma Miskew.

“I know that a lot of people talk about our record but, to me, so many of those games on the winning side of the record were really close where we pulled it out kind of like we did today.”

Now they’re just one more win away from representing Canada at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy. Homan and Miskew — who have since added third Tracy Fleury and lead Sarah Wilkes — made it to the 2018 Olympics and finished sixth.

A chance at redemption is within reach.

“It feels great. I think (we’re) just trying to stay with one shot at a time at this point and not get ahead of ourselves,” said Miskew.

“Clearly, that was a close battle so it could go either way tomorrow.”

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