Manitoba teams suffer Brier meltdown

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This article was published 08/03/2018 (3064 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

REGINA — It was, as one veteran scribe here succinctly put it, a full-on Manitoba meltdown.

Desperately seeking wins, Manitoba men’s curling champion Reid Carruthers and wild-card representative Mike McEwen posted two ugly losses apiece Thursday to all but remove themselves from contention at the 2018 Brier.

Both have 5-4 records, each with a pair of games left today — including their own evening meeting. But they’re staring up at a bunch of world-class squads ahead of them in the eight-team championship-round standings.

“It might be what happened — poof,” said McEwen, assessing his chances after a brutal day on the Brandt Centre ice. “Some bad fortune going our way after some really good stuff happening our way at the start of the week. I don’t know. I don’t know what that means.”

Carruthers’ crew left the ice prematurely in both its games, suffering a 7-1 loss in eight ends to Brad Gushue’s Team Canada and then falling 8-2 to Alberta’s Brendan Bottcher in eight ends in the evening draw.

McEwen let an almost sure victory slip away with an ill-timed heavy draw in the 10th that gave Ontario’s John Epping a steal of two and an 8-7 afternoon victory.

Then, with the evening draw barely 20 minutes old, McEwen surrendered a shocking half-dozen in the first end to Northern Ontario’s Brad Jacobs and shook hands at 8-2 after six ends — two ends earlier than what’s usually allowed — with the full permission of Brier officials and the TV broadcaster.

“Not the day that we would have hoped for or, I guess, McEwen for that matter,” said Carruthers, who won his second provincial title in early February in Winkler.

“My team, we came out a little flat today. It’s embarrassing.

“It’s nothing against the teams we played because we played two awesome teams. But was it our best? No. We got outplayed in both games.”

Ontario, Northern Ontario and Ontario, all 8-1, booked spots in the final-four Page playoffs, starting Saturday.

In the evening draw, Epping registered his eighth straight victory, posting an 8-6 win over Nova Scotia’s Jamie Murphy (4-5). Team Canada prevailed 5-4 in an extra-end nail-biter over Saskatchewan’s Steve Laycock (5-4).

Bottcher’s Edmonton team (7-2) is very much in the thick of things and has huge matchups with Epping in the afternoon and Jacobs at night. He would have to lose both for Carruthers, McEwen or Laycock to have any chance of a tie-breaker scenario.

McEwen showed a discernible air of optimism when this rock ’n’ roll festival kicked off last weekend. The veteran skip appeared comfortable, confident and genuinely grateful to join many of Canada’s finest teams at the Brier, his third straight.

No doubt he’d earned it, not by traditional methods, but due to his squad’s consistency the past two seasons, piling up crucial Canadian Team Ranking System points. Slipping into that second-chance game Friday, the ‘play-in’ wild-card game — and making it count — pumped air in the tires of his Fort Rouge curling team.

Four straight victories to begin the Brier only served to rev the engine of one of Manitoba’s all-time great foursomes.

That spark is gone after dropping four of its last five.

Up by one on Ontario, McEwen just had to touch the four-foot with his last-stone draw of the 10th end. Upon release, the lack of attention to the rock by sweepers Denni Neufeld and Matt Wozniak was an ominous sign.

“I make that draw 99 times out of 100. I’ve made that draw tons. I’m a good enough player I’m going to make that almost every time. I didn’t… one of those weird anomalies,” said McEwen.

Hours later, a blooper reel of missed Manitoba shots resulted in the only six-ender of the Brier.

“Things went from a great three or four stones into a landslide. We got to a point where we were one shot away from disaster and that’s what happened,” McEwen said.

“I thought I threw it pretty good as it’s sailing wide. I have to make that because it’s game over if I don’t — and I didn’t make it. That’s it.”

Somehow, TSN stayed glued to the debacle through to the conclusion of the fifth end, even as the 2014 Olympic gold medallists led 7-1 with the hammer while three tightly fought games on the other sheets raged on.

“Any time something like that happens, the other team is pretty frustrated,” said Jacobs afterward. “If that would have happened to us, we would have been counting the ends until it was all over.”

That killer end came only two hours after the misfire against Epping.

“You feel pretty brutal. It’s such a tight turnaround, right?” said McEwen third B.J. Neufeld. “It’s tough to completely regroup. To lose a game like we did, it takes time to get it out of your head. That’s the unfortunate part of the game.”

McEwen plays Saskatchewan, with talented shooter Matt Dunstone of Winnipeg throwing the last stones, at 2 p.m. today and then plays his close friend, Carruthers, at 7 p.m.

Carruthers, joined on the team by Regina product Braeden Moswkowy at third, second Derek Samagalski and lead Colin Hodgson, meets Nova Scotia at 2 p.m.

Understandably dejected, Carruthers said they won’t simply roll over now.

“This is tough pill to swallow because we could be out at this point. But until I get told otherwise, we’re definitely going to try to rebound and come out strong,” he said. “It might come down to the last draw. I think mathematically we’re still 100 per cent alive, so we have to regroup. We have no choice.”

jason.bell@freepress.mb.caTwitter: @WFPJasonBell