Ugly win, but Jones will take it

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This article was published 14/02/2015 (4107 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

MOOSE JAW, Sask. — In the end, Jennifer Jones got her winning start at the 2015 Scotties Tournament of Hearts — though it wasn’t a very pretty one.

On Saturday night, Jones and Team Manitoba survived a sloppy second half against Team Ontario, escaping their first game of the week with a 7-5 victory.

The win is all that really matters on the standings, of course. But the game was marred by a trilogy of uncharacteristic misses, all of which conspired to hand Ontario skip Julie Hastings — who is making her first Scotties appearance — three consecutive steals in the game’s seventh, eighth and ninth ends.

It’s just not like Jones to miss two hammer shots in a row. Luckily for her, she’d built up a big enough lead before the break to keep the Ontario resurgence at bay.

“We got off to a great start and then two shots that we missed in those ends, and we didn’t really have a chance on my last one to score,” Jones said. “But we learned a little bit… we feel good with that win, and it’s nice to have to battle back and win the game.”

At first, it looked like Jones, third Kaitlyn Lawes, second Jill Officer and lead Dawn McEwen were cruising. They cracked the scoreboard early, forcing Hastings to make a tough draw in the very first end; the Ontario skip couldn’t make it then, handing Jones a steal to take a 1-0 lead.

After a second-end blank, Jones put Hastings into some hot water again in the third and picked up a stolen deuce. Hastings scored one in the fourth to get on the board, while Jones responded with a dramatic three-ender in the fifth to carry a 6-1 lead into the break.

That’s when the wheels started to look shaky on the Manitoba train — and the Ontario foursome began to push the play.

“We struggled a bit at the beginning, but we’re a team that knows how to come back,” Hastings said. “After the fifth end, we just started to throw more aggressively, leave rocks in play, put some guards up, and we started to make a few more shots, so I think that helped us out a bit.”

In the seventh, Jones’ hammer shot came in heavy, and Hastings picked up a steal of one.

In the eighth, Jones was aiming for a double with her final shot, but it wrecked on a guard. After the game was over, the Manitoba skip tipped her hat to an opponent who helped force those misses.

“She made a great hit-and-roll to get her first steal, and if she doesn’t make that we’re getting four or five,” Jones said. “She made fantastic shots, and we just couldn’t capitalize and make a big one after that.”

In the ninth, with a chance to score four and win the game, Jones threw an attempted double that didn’t take out Ontario’s shot rock, giving Hastings her third consecutive steal of one. For just a moment, Jones showed a flicker of frustration, gently raising her broom and tapping it lightly on the ice.

But after finishing out the game, the skip was focused on the lessons they had learned. “We got tricked a little bit on how fast it was going to be sliding, and the ice is just a little bit straighter than we would like, or that we’re used to,” Jones said. “So we’ll just have to tighten up the ice a little bit.”

Next up, Team Manitoba plays two games today. First, they’ll face B.C.’s Patti Knezevic at 2 p.m. They’ll follow that with a 7 p.m. tilt against Saskatchewan’s Stefanie Lawton, a game that could turn out to have significant playoff ramifications later in the week.

Perhaps the most buzzed-about match of the round robin comes on Monday night, when Jones & Co. will square off against two-time defending Canadian champion Rachel Homan.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca