GANGNEUNG, South Korea —To understand how nerve-wracking this game was, you needed only look at the empty seat in Team Canada’s cheering section at the Gangneung Curling Centre, the seat that was supposed to be occupied by Rachel Homan’s husband, Shawn Germain, who was instead too busy pacing to possibly be sitting.
When it was all over, the enormous wide-eyed exhale from coach Adam Kingsbury said it all: Canada is still in this. And what a gritty come-back win it was.
Up against a Swiss team that also entered this game with a 1-3 record, one loss away from what could prove to be too many to advance to the playoffs, you could feel the tension. You could see it, too, all over the face of second Joanne Courtney, whose deep exhales were a fixture as she struggled with a game-low 58 per cent efficiency.
But it mattered not, in the end. “We kind of just said, ‘Let’s go out there and fight,’” said third, Emma Miskew.
They sure had to. The final score of 10-8 is misleading, because close at that sounds, it was a heck of a lot closer. And it was Miskew who had perhaps the finest shot in this game, in the ninth end, with a killer freeze that eventually led Homan to a wide open take-out to score three.
It was enormous because of what happened before that. Team Homan gave up three points to the Swiss in two separate ends. They trailed 7-4 and then 8-6 heading into the ninth. You didn’t want to see Swiss skip Silvania Tirinzoni in that situation, because she usually cruises to victory. Her record without hammer while up two points with two ends to play in the last four seasons? It was 30-1. Now it’s 30-2.
After that three-point end of Canada’s, the reigning world champions were in the driver’s seat heading into 10, needing to force a single to then force an extra end, where they’d have the hammer. But Canada didn’t need to. In the 10th, Homan made Tirinzoni draw the button around a couple guards, but the Swiss rock was heavy and it cruised right by, giving Canada a steal of one.
The Canadians hugged one another on the ice, and then came together for the group hug. Homan’s husband, Germaine, also returned to his seat at that point, wearing a huge smile. And someone from that crowd of friends and family yelled: “We believe!”
“It was a really character win,” said Homan, who took a sip of her water between answering questions and apologized for the delay in her answer, because, as she said, “my throat’s a little dry from yelling.”
It was perhaps the type of win Team Homan needed, in stark contrast to their first a day earlier, an absolute demolition of the United States that was never in doubt. Sunday’s victory, Kingsbury said, “was one of those ones where it just as easily could’ve gone the other way.”
It really looked like it was going to go Switzerland’s. It’s incredibly rare to win a curling game after giving up two three-enders, but the tide turned and Canada got some breaks on a couple slight-misses from the Swiss. Miskew said the thinking was never, “We need to come back,” it was literally a shot-by-shot plan of, “I’m going to make this freeze, or I’m going to make this guard,” she said. “It was one shot at a time and just try to put them into the spots that we wanted so that we could capitalize on hopefully a mistake, and that’s what we did.”
They clawed. They grinded. They fought. In other words, Mr. T would have loved this one.
This is a different foursome than the one you saw earlier in this bonspiel, the one that went 0-3. Miskew says they’re having fun, that they’ve decided to change their mindset. “We chose to let go of the last couple days…There’s nothing you can do about the way you start but you can do something about the way you finish.” And after a second win here, the third added, “It’s the start of us feeling more confident in shot-making out there.”
Just before he ran off to catch the bus with the rest of the team, coach Kingsbury put it best: “They’re rolling,” he said.
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