Englot stuns Jones to reach Manitoba Scotties final

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 29/01/2017 (3400 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Don’t worry, Michelle Englot said with a laugh, she’ll keep the green stuff in her closet. She’s a good ol’ Saskatchewan girl and a Riders season-ticket holder, so she has a lot of it. This weekend, it stays hidden.

After all, she’s an honorary Winnipegger now — and one win away from becoming Manitoba curling champion.

Englot’s foursome bested Jennifer Jones Saturday night, running away with the Manitoba Scotties 1-vs.-1 Page playoff game. By a 9-5 score, the Granite Curling Club crew handed Jones her first loss of these provincials.

Now they’ll wait to see who they’ll play in today’s 3 p.m. final, which will be broadcast live on Sportsnet. Jones, meanwhile, will have to regroup for 9 a.m. this morning, when she will face Darcy Robertson in the semifinal.

“We’ll enjoy this one first, and then refocus and try and come out just as strong tomorrow,” Englot said. “Whoever comes out of the semifinal is going to give us a really strong game, and we need to play as good, if not better.”

Englot is as seasoned as anyone on the circuit: she’s 53 years old, a seven-time Saskatchewan champion. She still lives in Regina, in fact, but this season drove to Winnipeg as often as she could to practise with her teammates.

They chose her in the wake of last year’s provincial final. After the dust had settled, skip Kristy McDonald decided to retire, but third Kate Cameron, second Leslie Wilson and lead Raunora Westcott wanted to keep playing.

So the trio called Englot, who jumped at the chance. (Under typical curling rules, one member of a team is exempt from provincial residency requirements.) Now, they’re one win away from a buffalo jacket.

Yeah, Englot said, after all these years it might feel strange to wear it — but she’ll cross that bridge if she comes to it.

“We’ll take it one shot at a time and go from there,” she said.

Hey, that’s how they won the Page. It was a gripping game, crafty and tight. Both teams suffered early misses, as rocks flew over stretches of straight ice. Englot caught on faster; Jones’ crew struggled, especially with the hammer.

“I think we just got caught a little bit on the ice,” Jones said. “It was a little bit straighter than it had been, but we’ll figure that out a little bit better tomorrow… they played well. We just couldn’t make that big shot when we had to.”

There was the fourth end, where Englot choked off Jones’ path to the button and stole a single. In the fifth, Englot threw a pretty hit, and Jones replied with a draw that groaned to a halt far too soon; another Englot steal.

“We had them scrambling for those four ends, for sure,” Englot said, of how her team ratcheted up the pressure. “We were executing our shots as we wanted and getting the rolls that we needed to keep them in trouble.”

In the seventh, that pattern basically happened again: Jones’ hammer wrecked, and this time Englot stole a deuce. With a 7-3 lead and just three more ends to play, it was too much for the Olympic champions to overcome.

Not that it’s ever safe to count Jones out. She did rally for a big deuce in the eighth, but Englot pushed back aggressively. Her last shot in nine, a silken draw to cosy up to the button, scored two. That brought on handshakes.

So it’s to be Jones and Robertson in the semifinal. Robertson, who is making her 21st provincial appearance, booked her passage forward with a nail-biter win over rising star Shannon Birchard in the 2-vs.-2 Page game.

Birchard struck for a deuce in the first end, but Robertson seized the reins soon after. She got a single in the second, stole one more in the third and in the fourth end she crowded the house full of her yellow rocks.

There wasn’t much Birchard could do facing that kind of trouble; her hammer shot slid heavy, handing Robertson a steal of three and a 5-2 lead. It looked for awhile as if that might be the end, but Birchard was not done yet.

The 22-year-old skip battled back with a single and a stolen deuce to keep it close. In the ninth, a Robertson miss gave Birchard a steal of one and a 6-6 tie game coming home; Robertson secured a single for a 7-6 win.

With that, it capped off an emotional day at Scotties. The round robin finished in a flurry that few would have predicted: a three-way tie atop one round-robin group, a two-way battle for second place behind Jones in the other.

Birchard glided through her tiebreaker test, defeating Brandon Curling Club skip Cheryl Reed 11-4. But Einarson, the 2015 Manitoba champion, struggled to get a handle on the ice in her tiebreaker against Robertson.

Robertson stole a deuce in the seventh end, and four more in the eighth to put the game to bed. After the match, Einarson wiped tears away; coming in as second seed, she always believed she could defend her title.

“It’s very hard, especially when you come into this thing expecting to win it again, it’s tough,” she said, speaking to media after the game. “We didn’t play like we can, and that’s what happens.”

Einarson praised Robertson and her team, who “played really well,” she said; both in the tiebreaker, and in the morning round-robin win that pushed Einarson out of first place in the group.

Before the playoffs began, organizers named the 2017 Manitoba Scotties all-star team. Getting the nod were skip Jennifer Jones, Englot third Kate Cameron, Robertson second Vanessa Foster and Birchard lead Mariah Mondor.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca