David Murdoch maintains his rink are playing well enough to make the play-offs at the Curling Men’s World Championships, they just need to a little more luck after a frustrating Tuesday in Canada.
The Scottish rink lost 6-5 to Switzerland in the final end of their encounter before beating winless Netherlands 9-5 in the afternoon session.
Second-placed Switzerland opened the game with a single, before Murdoch’s levelled things at 3-3 in the fourth, only for the Swiss to take a narrow 4-3 lead into the last two ends.
Murdoch picked up a double with the hammer in the ninth to give his side the advantage going into the last, but Peter de Cruz’s men returned the favour in the tenth to take the win.
It was a simpler story in the afternoon session, though, with Murdoch skipping his quartet to a 4-2 lead after the fourth.
Doubles in the sixth and seventh extended Scotland’s lead to 8-3, before they exchanged points in the final two to end proceedings – but Murdoch was still frustrated by events earlier in the day.
“I’m still disappointed that we lost in the morning, so we were taking out our frustration on the Dutch a bit there,” he admitted.
“We’ve been playing good and we just didn’t quite get the breaks against the Swiss and China.
“For us, we’ve just got to keep churning out some wins to try to drag ourselves up the table. All we know is – we’ve got to keep winning.
“The only game we didn’t perform in was against Canada, other than that, we’ve played pretty solid and every team has played extremely well – that’s the standard of the tournament.
“We need to raise our game to another gear.”
Murdoch’s rink now face Sweden in Thursday’s morning session, before taking on Italy in the evening, with both sides above them in the standings.
Elsewhere in Edmonton wins for Italy and USA set up a three-way tie for fourth in the standings with Japan –behind unbeaten Canada at the top and Switzerland and Sweden – tied for second on six wins and one loss.
Behind that a trio of China, Norway and Scotland have narrow losing records with three wins and four losses, before Germany round out the top ten with two victories from seven matches.
The Netherlands and Russia then complete the 12-team table with neither rink managing a win from their seven matches to date – the all-important head-to-head coming in Wednesday’s afternoon session.
Sportsbeat 2017