A VERRRRY ENTERTAINING 8TH END!

This is the situation faced by Dale Hockley and his team (throwing blue) down two coming home without – three rocks each to come.

Down 4-1 playing the seventh end – you just drew for 1 facing four to be down two coming home. What are the odds you are going to win the game? What are the odds you are even going to force an extra end?

With three rocks each to come, Canadian Police Champion Dale Hockley’s team faced that turning point shot we have all faced – “game’s probably over if we don’t make a pretty good shot right now!!”

Third Glenn Brannan made a dandy. With the added consideration that it was an early August event in an abnormally hot summer, the fact the St. Vital ice was as good as it was at the end of the Police-Fire Games was a surprise to many – and that made Brennan’s shot maybe as good a shot as you’ll see all winter.

Blue third – second stone covered the pinhole and left no workable angles for yellow to work with

Yellow third’s second stone was just as perfect – a draw to juggle the centre line pair just a little bit, setting up a straight raise to the shot stone

Blue skip first stone – not where he wanted to take away that double run but it turned out that biting the button with a third stone was also a pretty good idea. One of the benefits of being a curling photographer is that I get to listen to the team conversation as they deliberate and yellow was not convinced that even a perfect shot was going to leave them very well off. They expected there could still very well be two counters left.

The yellow skip first stone was not perfect – it over curled and crossed centre as it made contact. The angle and the drag resulted in worst case scenario – all three blue stones still counting. It seemed like all blue needed was a guard to at least set up a very difficult last shot for yellow.

Hard to throw that perfect guard on ice swinging from about the outside edge of the 12 foot circle and blue skip’s last stone guard curled almost across centre leaving a deceptively difficult last shot for yellow. As you go to the hack in this situation, every on-looker is thinking “if you miss this, you’ll be explaining for the rest of your life how you lost that gold medal game”.

The body language and the look on the face of Steve Moss tell the story as the yellow last shot didn’t curl up quite enough – rubbed off their own stone biting top four foot – rolled across the face of the other two counters, removing one but leaving a steal of two to force the extra end.