Around the Rings

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 13/03/2009 (6368 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Martin nips Howard in battle of Brier’s best

CALGARY — It was the most hotly anticipated game of the week — Alberta’s Kevin Martin versus Ontario’s Glenn Howard on the last draw of the Brier Thursday night.

It lived up to its billing as the two best teams in the field all week went toe-to-toe for 10 ends, slugging it out in an exceptionally well-played game that ended with Howard missing a thin double takeout with the last rock of the tenth end to hand Martin a steal and a 7-5 victory.

The game itself had very little impact on either team’s standing at this Brier. Ontario and Alberta had already clinched berths into tonight’s Page playoffs 1 vs. 2 game (7 p.m., TSN), where the winner advances straight to Sunday’s Brier final, and the loser gets a second chance in the semifinal.

The immediate value of last night’s win to Alberta was simply earning the hammer for tonight’s game. But it had much greater significance historically, as it represented Martin’s 24th consecutive Brier victory after going 13-0 at last year’s Brier.

That breaks the old consecutive-win record at the Brier of 23, owned by the Randy Ferbey foursome from earlier this decade.

Rink best after bender

MUCH was expected this week and very little delivered by Jamie Koe’s N.W.T./Yukon team. So he decided to party it up Wednesday night — and promptly played his best game of the week.

Koe has an excellent curling pedigree — his brother is top cashspieler Kevin Koe and his sister is perennial Scotties representative Kerry Galusha.

Plus, Jamie Koe curled on the World Curling Tour out of Calgary for years and is very familiar, unlike most northern skips, with the competition in the south and what it takes to beat them.

And so put it all together and there were more than a few prognosticators picking Koe to potentially get the North back to the Brier playoffs for the first time in more than 30 years this week.

Alas, Koe lost some tough games early and promptly went into the tank, charting his slide into the depths of Brier depression in amusing posts on his Facebook site.

With nothing to lose on the final day of the round-robin yesterday, Koe and his teammates decided to tie one on Wednesday night in what proved to be an epic bender.

Then they promptly came out Thursday morning and played their best game of the week, eliminating a plucky B.C. team from playoff contention with an 11-3 throttling.

"I had a half-hour of sleep," Koe said afterward, oozing sweat from every pore. "We shut down the (Brier) Patch. I have no comment after that."

So how does a mind-bending bender help an underachieving team finally live up to expectations.

"We finally came out relaxed," Koe said. "We’d been trying to find that attitude all week."

Stoughton’s timely advice

JEFF STOUGHTON says it’s time the Brier changed the way they time games.

Now, teams are timed for the entire time they are in control of the house, from the time their opponents’ rock comes to a rest to the time their own comes to a rest.

Stoughton would like that to change to a new system in use on the Grand Slam circuit this year, in which teams are given less time but are only timed for the time they stand around talking about a shot — thinking time, in Grand Slam parlance — and not the time the rock is actually in play.

The big advantage to that system, which is universally lauded by curlers who have used it, is you are not penalized in time if you happen to be in a position where you have to play a lot of draws.

"It doesn’t matter if it’s a hit, peel, draw, your time doesn’t run while the rock is running," Stoughton said. "It just makes sense. It can take 45 seconds for the rock to get down there sometimes."

— Wiecek