Manitoba roars into top spot

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This article was published 23/02/2017 (3351 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ST. CATHARINES, Ont. — Midway through the Scotties Tournament of Hearts round robin, Michelle Englot said she hoped her Manitoba team would start games sharper.

They were closing strong, she thought, just not opening with the same fire.

Well, scoring four in the first end of a pivotal showdown against Rachel Homan — that’s the definition of a good start.

Now, thanks in part to that massive opener, the Manitobans own the round robin. When they shook on a 9-5, eight-end win over Ontario titan Homan, they had paved their way to a coveted spot in Friday night’s 1-vs.-2 Page playoff game.

Ten wins, one loss. It’s the best round-robin result Englot, a seven-time Saskatchewan champion, has had at Scotties. Her previous high-water mark came in her debut in 1988, when she finished 9-2.

“It’s pretty incredible,” Englot said. “Kate (Cameron, third) said I just needed to move to Manitoba a little earlier.”

The bad news is, they’ll have to play Homan at least once more this weekend, in that 1-vs.-2 Page game. But for one night at least, the Granite Curling Club four, featuring the front end of Leslie Wilson and Raunora Westcott, could just celebrate.

It wasn’t the prettiest game, but the circumstances made it a stunner. When Englot scored four in the first, taking advantage of a Homan miss to throw a slick hit, it was the first time a team had landed four on Homan this week.

At the time, Manitoba didn’t get too jubilant — it knew there was a long road ahead. “It’s like, ‘We have to protect this lead for nine ends?’” Englot said with a laugh.

Both skips had hits; both also had misses. There was Englot’s second shot of the second, an attempted hit-and-roll double; it struck its first target thin and flew out of the house, giving Homan an easy draw to the eight-foot for two.

Meanwhile, Homan was far from perfect. Trailing 5-2 in the fourth end but loaded up with hammer, she aimed for an ambitious bomb. If it had worked, she might have scored as many as three and changed the game significantly.

But the shot flew wrong from the start. It struck on the nose and stuck for a stolen Manitoba single.

Ultimately, the skips’ misses balanced out; at the fifth-end break, with Manitoba leading 7-2, both were shooting 68 per cent. Englot would finish a little higher, at 78 per cent to Homan’s 73; Cameron was red-hot at 92 per cent.

Then there were the shots that defined the game — and few were more elegant than Englot’s seventh-end hammer.

When she settled into the hack, Manitoba was already counting one (it was sitting right on the button). But Homan had used her last throw to nestle Ontario granite right above the shot rock, leaving little room for a buffalo deuce.

Many skips would have just thrown the hammer through, and carried an 8-4 lead into the eighth. But Englot gathered the team to talk to coach Ron Westcott. In the stands at the Meridian Place, a fan yelled: “Just throw it away!”

Truthfully, that was Englot’s first plan, too. Instead, she decided to take a chance and put the game away.

“I was going to throw it away,” she said. “But it was a big point. You go up five with three ends left, it’s pretty big. Teams have been coming (back) from deficits all week, so every point counts against a team like Rachel Homan.”

That hammer found its home, striking Homan’s yellow razor-thin. The Ontario rock squirted out the house, leaving Manitoba’s shot rock. That gave Englot a deuce and a 9-4 lead going into eight; that was, effectively, the game.

After the match, Homan (10-1) wasn’t too flustered. Her side won’t have first-end hammer or choice of rocks in the 1-vs.-2 Page playoff — that advantage will go to Englot, as the No. 1 finisher — but Ontario is still in it.

“We had an awesome round robin,” she said. “Super proud of the girls. We worked really hard to get in this position… and we’re exactly where we wanted to be. We’re pretty excited, and really proud of our performance this week.”

The win sent ripples through Meridian Centre. For former Manitoba champion, then Alberta skip and now defending queen of Canada, Chelsea Carey, it meant she will have to carry her 8-2 record into the 3-vs.-4 Page game.

Carey won’t know her opponent until this morning. Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville (7-3) plays Northwest Territories in the last draw; if she wins she’ll leapfrog Quebec’s Eve Belisle, who finished at 7-4.

Previously, it was a day of frustration around the Meridian Centre, as ice conditions deteriorated. It didn’t help that it was unseasonably hot in St. Catharines, warming up to 16 C, and the arena’s dehumidifier malfunctioned.

The warmth and humidity combined to leave a veil of frost over the ice. After the eighth end of Manitoba’s morning game against British Columbia, the teams discovered sloppy splotches of melted ice pooling under the rocks.

The discovery prompted one player on Team B.C. — forgetting, surely, she was on a live TSN mike — to quip she didn’t want to “play this s—show anymore.” The teams quickly shook on a 7-2 win for Manitoba.

Ice crews worked hard to improve the situation, even doing a full scrape of the sheets at the fifth-end breaks. By the afternoon, some teams said the ice seemed to be be more stable.

Still, it remained far from typical.

“It’s just tough for everyone,” Homan said after the evening game. “It’s just trying to hit paint. I haven’t missed paint all week. It feels like it ground on my hand. It’s the way the sport goes sometimes.”

Even in the worst of it, Homan still found a way to shoot 99 per cent in the morning draw, which helped her seal a comfortable 5-1 win over Quebec. So as always, the top skips still found a way to deal.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca z