McEwen misses the mark

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This article was published 11/03/2021 (1837 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Mike McEwen was simply reacting to the moment at hand, although his words epitomized the kind of Brier it’s been for his West St. Paul crew.

“No, gone,” he uttered Wednesday afternoon, his final rock of the eighth end at WinSport Arena gliding into oblivion.

“It’s gone,” third Reid Carruthers concurred from the house on Sheet D, watching his skipper’s intended hit for three veer left and, ultimately, miss the mark.

The errant toss resulted in a steal of one for Brendan Bottcher, literally a moot point by then as the squad from Edmonton’s Saville Sports Centre posted a lopsided 9-3 victory over McEwen (Team Wild Card 1) on Day 6 of the Canadian men’s curling championship.

Tumbling to 2-4, McEwen’s aspirations for a spot in the championship round are a pipe dream, even with a couple of potential wins on the horizon to complete the round-robin in nine-team Pool A.

“I think the way things are in our pool — we were even thinking that 5-3 probably got you a tie-breaker — so I don’t think our games really matter (Thursday),” he told the Free Press, in a phone chat from Calgary.

Preliminary play wraps up tonight, with four teams in each of two Brier pools playing Friday and Saturday in the championship round. From there, the top three vault to the Sunday playoffs.

McEwen and Carruthers, joined by second Derek Samagalski and lead Colin Hodgson, face Greg Skauge of Northwest Territories (1-5) in the morning and wrap up against Ray Mikkelsen of Yukon (0-6) in the evening.

Meanwhile, Manitoba’s Jason Gunnlaugson dropped a 3-0 decision to Northern Ontario’s Brad Jacobs in a tedious afternoon Brier battle, just the fifth shutout in 41 years and first since 1998 — incredibly hard to fathom given curling’s five-rock free guard zone.

Curling Canada tweeted it tied the mark for the lowest-scoring affair in Brier history.

The loss was the first blemish on the Morris-based team’s impressive record (5-1) in Pool A. Gunnlaugson is a virtual lock to make at least a tie-breaker, and at least a split of matchups with B.C.’s Steve Laycock (2-4) and Wild Card 3’s Glenn Howard would guarantee advancement.

Howard’s team, skipped by Wayne Middaugh, is also 5-1, so there’s the potential for a mammoth collision with Gunnlaugson on the late draw.

Jacobs upgraded to 5-2 with the win over McEwen, Bottcher is now 4-2, while New Brunswick’s James Grattan is still in the picture at 4-3.

Northern Ontario peeled a pile of guards and kept things tidy against Manitoba, blanking the first three ends before being compelled to take a single in the fourth. Gunnlaugson posted zeroes in the fifth, sixth and seventh ends, but finally had something cooking in the eight.

“We got a chance to go around some staggered centres (guards) there and just three shots in a row we didn’t quite make perfectly. A deuce in eight would have been huge, but it was a team effort to not capitalize,” he said with a laugh, throwing no one under the bus.

Instead, Manitoba gave up a steal to Jacobs — the Brier’s top seed and world’s No.1-ranked team — and the, coughed up another point in the ninth when a last-ditch circus shot failed.

“We played them pretty tough. It was a fun game but it looks pretty boring, I guess,” said Gunnlaugson, who is flanked by third Adam Casey, second Matt Wozniak and lead Connor Njegovan.

Surprisingly, McEwen was rather upbeat in his assessment of his foursome’s third consecutive appearance at the national championship. The team has yet to make the playoffs but lost a tie-breaker 12 months ago at the 2020 Brier in Kingston, Ont., and all four members were named all-stars.

The Brandon-born curler said it was relatively easy to find a silver lining this time around, noting the finesse shots — the team’s hallmark — are still being made with consistency. However, the up-weight hitting game is a work in progress.

“Our touch and our feel, that came back very quickly… combined with communication, our sweeping and judgment, that’s what we had going for us,” McEwen said. “(In Kingston), our power game, our heavyweight-hit game, was capable. But that’s missing right now.

“Once that’s on track, I’m very happy with things. At least that gives us very clear direction of what to work on, where we need to take our game for the fall. It’s not all bad, as long as you can identify the lessons and bounce back quickly from it.”

The team is slated to compete in a pair of Grand Slam tour events inside the Calgary bubble later in the spring, but McEwen indicated he’ll remain in Winnipeg. His wife, Dawn, is scheduled to deliver the couple’s second child the second week of April.

Late Wednesday, Ontario’s John Epping stunned Kevin Koe’s Wild Card 2 team 9-3 to hand the Calgary-based crew its first defeat in the Pool B round robin. But Koe remains perched alone atop the standings at 6-1.

Defending champion Brad Gushue (Team Canada) enjoyed a two-victory day to move to 5-2, the identical record of Epping and Saskatchewan’s Matt Dunstone. Quebec’s Michael Fournier and Jamie Murphy’s Nova Scotia team, skipped by Scott McDonald, are 4-3 and still have a shot at a tie-breaker.

jason.bell@freepress.mb.ca

Twitter: @WFPJasonBell