PEI’s Robyn MacPhee attempted a light takeout on her last shot in an extra end in tonight’s Scotties tiebreaker against Jennifer Jones and Team Canada, but both rocks ended up touching the edge of the four foot, with the MacPhee rock ending up in second place by a narrow margin, giving Team Canada a 6-5 victory, and ending PEI’s playoff run. Team Canada now advances to Saturday’s three-four Page playoff game at 3:30 p.m. on TSN against Saskatchewan’s Stefanie Lawton. Saskatchewan was awarded third place because it recorded wins over both Team Canada and P.E.I.
MacPhee’s shot was almost a carbon copy of her tenth end final shot, which ended up in exactly the same situation, and forced the extra end.
A year ago in Regina, Jones’s Manitoba team finished 7-4 and needed to come out of a tiebreaker en route to winning the Canadian and world championship.
“We have to play as good as we can and hopefully that’s good enough to keep going,” said Jones going in to Friday’s assignment against P.E.I. “I thought we controlled that game (earlier, against B.C.). It felt pretty good from start to finish. We needed to come out and better, and I thought we did tonight. We’re still alive, and that’s all you can ask for.”
B.C., meanwhile, will play in the Page playoff one-two game Friday at 10:30 p.m. against Quebec’s Marie-France Larouche, who prevailed out of the 7-4 teams through the tiebreaker formulas to place second in the round-robin. B.C. lost both of its games on Thursday.
The winner of the Page one-two game goes to Sunday’s 9 p.m. championship final, while the loser drops to Saurday’s 8 p.m. semifinal against the winner of the three-four game.
The winner of Sunday’s championship final advances to the world women’s championship, set for March 21 to 29 in Gangneung, South Korea.