Manitoba’s teams prepare for Scotties playoff fight

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This article was published 31/01/2018 (3146 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PENTICTON, B.C. — At times, the first four days of the 2018 Scotties Tournament of Hearts felt like a warm-up for the battles to come.

Well, that part’s over. Now, it’s time for the top-eight teams to duke it out for a playoff spot — and despite Wednesday’s stumbles, Manitoba’s Jennifer Jones, Michelle Englot and Kerri Einarson are all going through to the next round.

Let’s start with a look at Team Canada’s Englot, who seized second place in her round-robin pool.

Englot closed her round robin at 5-2 on Wednesday afternoon, after a 7-5 loss to Ontario’s Hollie Duncan (4-3).

It was a crowded game: at one point in the eighth, seven rocks were crammed inside the four-foot.

Englot had a chance there to score three and tie the game at six apiece, but missed her last shot; Duncan singled in 10 to win.

That’s not quite the way that Englot wanted to finish the round robin, but her playoff quest will roll on.

“Five and two isn’t too bad going into the next round,” she said. “You need to get hot on the final weekend and win all your games from there on in anyway. So we’ll regroup and come out strong tomorrow.”

Alberta’s Casey Scheidegger (6-1) seized top spot in Pool B with a win over teen skip Emilia Gagné of Quebec (3-4). British Columbia’s Kesa Van Osch finished third with her 4-3 record, after defeating Newfoundland on Wednesday.

With the top-four finishers from each pool moving on to the championship round, that left one more spot to sort out. So Ontario’s Duncan and Newfoundland’s Stacie Curtis, both 4-3, will head to a tiebreaker this morning.

(The reason they’re in it: Van Osch had defeated both Ontario and Newfoundland, to claim the third spot.)

Out of championship-round contention: Quebec, Prince Edward Island’s Robyn MacPhee (2-5) and Nunavut’s Amie Shackleton (0-7). They’ll play one last seeding draw against the other pool’s low-ranked teams on Friday morning.

What’s strange for Englot, under this new format, is that she didn’t know the next team she’ll be facing.

As second-place finisher in her pool, she knows she will play the third-place team from the other group this afternoon.

To find out who that would be, she had to wait and see what happened in the Wednesday night draw.

“We had our whole week planned the last time,” Englot said of her 2017 Scotties run.

“We knew we had Rachel Homan in our last round-robin game, so then you can watch how things play out. So this will be interesting.”

So what was happening on the other side of the round robin?

For starters, after an outright dominant week in Penticton, Manitoba champion Jones suffered her first loss on Wednesday morning.

She fell 9-5 to Northern Ontario’s Tracy Fleury, who was battling to keep her playoff hopes alive.

That put Jones at 5-1 on the week, with one critical Wednesday game left against fellow Manitoban and Team Wild Card skip Einarson, who is also 5-1. That game ended after press time; winnipegfreepress.com will have the story.

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Einarson polished her record on Wednesday morning with a 9-3 win over Northwest Territories skip Kerry Galusha.

Also from that group, Nova Scotia veteran Mary-Anne Arsensault and New Brunswick’s Sylvie Robichaud still had a chance to earn a championship round or tiebreaker spot, pending the outcome of Wednesday night’s games.

Saskatchewan’s Sherry Anderson, Northwest Territories’ Galusha and Yukon’s Chelsea Duncan were out.

The championship round kicks off today and continues Friday with draws at 4 p.m. and 9 p.m. CST. The top-four finishers from that kerfuffle will advance to the playoffs, which are set to begin Saturday afternoon.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

Melissa Martin
Reporter-at-large

Melissa Martin reports and opines for the Winnipeg Free Press.

Every piece of reporting Melissa produces is reviewed by an editing team before it is posted online or published in print — part of the Free Press‘s tradition, since 1872, of producing reliable independent journalism. Read more about Free Press’s history and mandate, and learn how our newsroom operates.