Jones in danger of missing playoffs

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This article was published 07/12/2017 (3086 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

OTTAWA — She has a reputation for being among the very best in the sport when her back is to the wall.

Well, back meet wall — and wall meet Jennifer Jones.

Jones lost her second in a row at the Roar of the Rings on Thursday afternoon, falling 7-3 to Thunder Bay’s Krista McCarville.

The loss dropped Jones’s round-robin record to 5-2 and means she now has the unenviable task of needing a win over hometown favourite Rachel Homan (6-1) on the final draw of the round robin tonight, or she could miss the playoffs entirely.

It’s a stunning turn of events for a squad that opened these Canadian Olympic curling trials at 5-0 and looked like were the team to beat just a couple of days ago.

“Obviously, you come in here and you never want to lose back-to-back, and we did,” Jones said afterward. “We’ve put ourselves in a ‘backs to the wall’ situation where we’re going to have to win (today) and hopefully give ourselves a chance.”

If Jones loses to Homan, she’ll need McCarville (4-2) to lose one of her team’s final two games, or Jones will be eliminated.

McCarville plays Chelsea Carey (6-0) and Val Sweeting (3-4) today.

Jones fell behind early to McCarville and trailed 4-1 heading into the fifth-end break. She spent the rest of the game chasing McCarville, who is at her best when she’s playing with a lead.

With that, a Jones team that had won 19 games in a row as of Tuesday now has a two-game losing streak (Jones lost to Carey on Wednesday) and is going the wrong way at an event that is all about peaking for the weekend.

Now, it needs to be said at this point that Jones has often been at her best over the years when things have been at their worst.

Twice at the national Scotties — in 2008 and 2009 — Jones limped through the round robin, qualified through a tiebreaker game and then promptly ran the table all the way to national titles.

It’s a history of overcoming adversity that she was only too happy to be reminded of on Thursday.

“We don’t mind that,” Jones said. “It kind of gets the adrenalin flowing. It’s all about playing in big games and big moments.”

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Tonight against Homan certainly qualifies as both those things. After losing her opening game, Homan has now won six in a row and will have the biggest crowd of the week cheering her on tonight. (Organizers have sold 8,000 tickets per draw — and counting — for the weekend.)

But it’s Carey who is in the driver’s seat right now. Still undefeated after a wild 9-8 come-from-behind win over Julie Tippin on Thursday in which she authored an exceedingly rare game-winning steal of three in the final end, Carey is the only team to have defeated Homan this week and holds all the tiebreakers over her.

That means Carey needs just one victory in her final two games to clinch a berth in Sunday afternoon’s women’s final.

That’s no small perk. History suggests that teams that earn the bye to the final at this event have a huge advantage. In five previous trials events, nine of the 10 winners had the bye to the final — Shannon Kleibrink’s win in 2005 being the only exception.

paul.wiecek@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @PaulWiecek