The coach of Britain’s Winter Olympic men’s team was less than impressed at the way his men ran the risk of making an embarrassing early exit in their home event at but Viktor Kjell expressed satisfaction with the way they responded to their self-inflicted crisis at the City of Perth Masters.
Team Smith had looked to make easy progress to the quarter-finals by working their way through the A Road unbeaten until they threw away a three shot lead at the final end of Friday’s meeting with fellow Olympians Team De Cruz who will represent Switzerland in South Korea and they followed that up by losing 7-1 in the B Road to their fellow Scots, skipped by Sochi silver medallist Tom Brewster first thing yesterday.
“My first comment after the loss to De Cruz was that we had to see it as a positive. We then played a team like Brewster this morning and we knew they were obviously going to be good and we were never close to our standard at all and that’s when you lose, but we turned it around really quick with two good games which got us back where we should be. So, I’m quite happy with where we are. We wanted to play a lot of games this weekend and we’ve done that,” Kjell said of the extended route they had to take on the C Road, claiming solid wins over Norway’s Team Walstad, 6-4 and the Czech Republic’s Team Snitil, 5-3.
With 32 teams having begun the competition the efficacy of the triple knockout format was evident as all seven Olympic teams taking part – only hosts South Korea, Canada and the USA are missing – were either through to the quarter-finals or still involved going into the final round of qualifying.
First through were Kjell’s former team-mates Team Edin, the Swedes who are arguably the world’s best and dominate the European game and they were joined in negotiating the A Road by De Cruz, while Germany’s Team Baumann and the youthful Scottish quartet skipped by Cameron Bryce came through the B Road.
In the last qualifying round two all-Olympic match-ups saw Smith facing Italy’s Team Retornaz and Denmark’s Team Stjerne face Japan’s Team Morozumi. Tom Brewster’s rink were meanwhile up against Norway’s former world champions Team Ulsrud, while Canada’s representatives in Perth, Team Simmond were up against Holland’s Team Van Dorp.
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