Top form elusive; Jones falters

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This article was published 25/03/2010 (5903 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SWIFT CURRENT, Sask. — All good things must come to an end — and in the case of Team Canada, it was the 11th end against Germany’s Andrea Schopp.

During the 13th draw, Jennifer Jones fell 8-7 to Germany in an extra end at the Credit Union iPlex, the first blemish on Canada’s now 8-1 record, which was still good enough for top spot at the 2010 Ford World Women’s Curling Championship and a guaranteed tie-breaker entering Wednesday night’s late draw.

Earlier in the day, Jones’s St. Vital quartet — which includes third Cathy Overton-Clapham, second Jill Officer and lead Dawn Askin — steamrolled Japan 10-2 to see the day end with a split.

Scotland stayed with the Canadians, improving to 8-1 with a 9-7 victory over Switzerland before beating the Americans 7-4 in the late draw.

It wasn’t as though the Canadians didn’t have their chances to remain undefeated. Jones trailed 7-6 coming home with the hammer, but could only manage a single to send the Germans to an extra end, where Schopp needed to just execute a partially open take-out of a Canadian stone, nudging the button and stick for the winning point.

"It wasn’t our sharpest game," acknowledged Jones, who posted a mortal 74 per cent shooting percentage against Germany. "(But) she (Schopp) made the shot to win.

"We’ll have to come out and win both our games tomorrow and see what happens from there," Jones added. "Obviously we’re disappointed, but you’re going to lose a game here or there likely, and we’d rather have it in the round robin.

"I hate saying this, but we were just on the other side of the inch. My last shot, great weight and perfect line and it just over-curled and gave her a shot, right? That’s just the way it works. Just a couple of uncharacteristic misses by us, but I’m sure we’ll bounce back… "

With Wednesday’s split, however, Jones did manage to secure at least a tiebreaker spot on Friday. The Canadians still have two games remaining in the round robin today, first against Russia (4-5) at 9:30 a.m. (TSN), followed by a critical showdown with Scotland’s Eve Muirhead at 8:30 p.m. (TSN).

With a pair of victories, Canada can still secure a spot in the 1 vs. 2 playoff game on Friday night.

Asked about her feelings about securing a one-two playoff berth, Jones smirked and replied: "We quite like it."

"But we seem to go through the tie-breakers," the skip added. "That’s fine, too. Hopefully, we’ll just keep plowing away. Our fate’s in our own hands. Sometimes we don’t even have that.

"We’ve done it both ways. We’ve gone through the one-two game this year at the Scotties, but we’ve gone through tiebreakers, too. You don’t really care, you just want to get to the playoffs. Yeah, the one-two is a nice game to play in, but if we’re not in there we’re OK with that."

Schopp, meanwhile, was just happy to stay in the playoff hunt, improving to 5-3. Didn’t matter that the home Team Canada was the victim.

"I don’t care about the Canadians, I care about us," the veteran of 17 worlds replied tersely when asked about ending the Canadian winning streak. "We have to try to get every point if we want to get to the semifinals. So I don’t care who we are playing, it’s just a point we need.

"That’s our goal to make the playoffs now because then the rules are completely different," Schopp concluded. "I’m not sure if we’ll make it, but we’ll try hard."

Also Wednesday, the worlds rookie outfit from Sweden, led by 22-year-old Cecilia Ostlund, edged Denmark 10-9 to improve to 6-3. The defending champion Chinese, meanwhile, improved to 5-4 with wins over Norway and Russia and are still in the playoff race.

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca