Schopp beats Jones; earns berth in final

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This article was published 27/03/2010 (5976 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SWIFT CURRENT, Sask. — If Jennifer Jones is going to win her second world women’s curling title, she’s going to have to do it the hard way.

Jones made a critical error in the ninth end of Friday night’s 1-2 Page playoff game to surrendered a four-ender to Germany’s Andrea Schopp, breaking a hard-fought contest wide open for an eventual 6-3 German victory.

Coincidentally, although Team Canada finished atop the round-robin standings with a sterling 10-1 record, the St. Vital club’s only loss was to the Germans, who, with Friday night’s victory, advanced directly to Sunday’s final.

In a rather curious post-game scrum, often-blunt Schopp, participating in her 17th worlds for Germany — her one and only title came way back in 1988– suggested that Jones was not only nervous, but that Team Canada doesn’t take her team seriously.

"She had a lot of misses in this game," the 45-year-old Schopp said of Jones. "She looked nervous in the beginning. I thought if we could survive the first five-six ends, we would have a chance in the end (because) she really becomes nervous. And she did."

When Schopp was asked if she was getting inside Jones head, the German skip replied: "No I don’t think so. But inside her head is maybe she has been four times to the worlds and only won it once. Not us. I don’t think she cares about us because we’re not a team that should be in here in her mind.

"For me I don’t think she takes — I’m not sure of the English expression — us for serious. I think they are all thinking we are not such good players."

Why? "The way they’re behaving. We have seen them a lot of times and played them a lot of times," Schopp explained. "For me, it seems she is behaving like they are the professionals and we are the persons who get around somewhere.

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"It’s nothing personal. It’s just the way she looks at us as a curling team. Not as a person."

Jones, meanwhile, will now play the winner of the Page 3-4 game between Scotland’s Eve Muirhead and Sweden’s Cecilia Ostlund Saturday (6 p.m., TSN). It was a low-scoring affair, with three blank ends and no more than one point scored over the first seven ends, with Canada and Germany locked at 2-2. Jones edged ahead 3-2 in the eighth, but on the next end a hit-and-roll to the button over-curled and slid through the house, leaving Schopp with an open hit for four.

"We just missed it," said Jones. "If we rub it (the German stone) we probably steal it, so… It’s just bad luck and, hopefully, we’ll come out and play good tomorrow night and get back in the final (on Sunday). We’ve done it before.

"It’s not a bad thing to play in the semis," Jones added. "It’s just disappointing how we lost. I thought we controlled the whole game and had a really bad ninth end."

randy.turner@freepress.mb.ca

Randy Turner
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Randy Turner spent much of his journalistic career on the road. A lot of roads. Dirt roads, snow-packed roads, U.S. interstates and foreign highways. In other words, he got a lot of kilometres on the odometer, if you know what we mean.

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