Carey punches ticket to final with shaky victory

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This article was published 24/02/2019 (2717 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

SYDNEY, N.S. — The way curling goes, you don’t always need to be perfect. Sometimes, you don’t even need to be good. There are games where all you need to do is hang on, stick around, to be waiting for that break that may never come. You won’t usually win those kind of games — but you will earn some.

Well, Chelsea Carey was not perfect on Saturday night. Nor, as she readily admitted, was she good. But the Alberta champion did hang on in the 2019 Scotties 1-vs-2 Page playoff, and though she struggled against Saskatchewan’s Robyn Silvernagle she never went away — until suddenly, she was on top.

By the time it was over, Carey had won 11-7. There, in front of about 2,500 people, former prime minister Stephen Harper and a man dressed like a human-sized paper towel, she had booked passage directly to today’s national championship final, her first time there since winning it all in 2016.

It wasn’t a beautiful way to get there. Carey, a former Manitoba champion, shot an anemic 64 per cent, though her team of third Sarah Wilkes, second Dana Ferguson and lead Rachel Brown were better. But thanks to a massive four-ender in the seventh, they had done enough to seize the win.

Thankfully, Carey said with a laugh, there are no pictures on the scoreboard. Only losses and wins.

“That was my worst game of the event,” Carey said. “So when she gave me one chance at a big end, I knew I had to make it, because we weren’t setting up a whole lot of chances to score multiple points, and they were playing really well… I made the big ones when it counted, which, I guess, that’s all that matters.”

For most of the early game, Silvernagle was soaring. In the first, Carey wielded last rock for a deuce; Silvernagle fired back in the second with a pretty draw for three. An attempted Alberta blank in the third turned into a Saskatchewan steal when Carey’s hit failed, giving the gals in green a 4-2 lead.

That’s when Silvernagle gave Carey the first of two gifts. Carey had played a fine freeze in the fifth, to sit shot; Silvernagle’s hammer wrecked on a guard, to tie the game 4-4 on an Alberta steal of one. By then, it was clear that the match would not be a game of sensational shots, but more a battle of attrition.

The seventh was the decider. Silvernagle’s last shot, a draw, stopped too short. That opened a chance for Carey, who had wrecked on her own first rock, to throw a critical tap-back. This time, she made no mistake: her hammer skimmed the edge of the guard and rolled into the house, cracked granite and scored four.

With just three ends left to play and trailing by three, Saskatchewan couldn’t claw their way back. They did snag an eighth-end deuce to narrow the gap, but Carey brought major pressure in the 10th. Facing a slew of Alberta rocks with her hammer, Silvernagle found herself without any real shot to win.

“Welcome to the five-rock rule, right?” Silvernagle said. “It’s never over until it’s over. You can never count yourself out… momentum swings happen quite a bit in a game, and I think it did happen a little bit in that game, and we just didn’t quite capitalize when we needed to.”

She will get a second chance to make the Scotties final. All she has to do is make it past Rachel Homan, who finished the week as the top-shooting skip in the field. The Ontario champion marched into today’s semifinal after dispatching Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville in the 3-vs-4 Page game.

Homan played the percentages in a clinical victory over McCarville.

She elected to hit and stick for a single and 5-3 lead in the eighth rather than blank the end. That gave hammer to McCarville — who led all teams with 21 steals — and forced her to try to create offence.

With lots of rocks in play in the ninth, Homan nailed a hit to take away any hope of a McCarville deuce. When Northern Ontario settled for a single, it gave Ontario what it desired — a one-point lead with hammer coming home.

The plan worked to perfection as Homan cleared two stones with her final throw for the win.

“We just wanted to manage the scoreboard,” she said.

Meanwhile, Carey will sit back and wait to learn who her final opponent will be. Will she get a rematch against Saskatchewan? Or will she go head-to-head against Homan, in a replay of the intense 2019 Olympic trials final?

Either way, the Alberta skip knows this much: with a maple leaf on the line, she can’t risk just hanging on. When it’s time to slide in tonight’s championship game, she will need to be great. The good news is that Carey and her crew were strong for most of the week; all they need to do is get back to form.

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“We had to grind through the season to get here, and we’ve had to grind through this whole week,” Carey said. “I’m sure the final will be more of the same. You throw ‘em up and down and see what happens… I’m a big believer of destiny in finals, so it’s our job to go through the motions and see if it’s our turn.”

During a a break in the 1-vs-2 game, the Scotties honoured the 2019 all-star team, which is selected purely on the basis of shot-making accuracy at each position.

Team Canada lead Dawn McEwen made the cut, as did Northern Ontario second Jen Gates, Ontario third Emma Miskew and Homan.

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca

— with files from the Canadian Press

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.