GANGNEUNG, South Korea (CCA/WCF), March 26, 2009 — Canada’s Jennifer Jones will play in the Page playoff three vs. four game Saturday at the Mount Titlis world women’s curling championship.
Jones, third Cathy Overton-Clapham, second Jill Officer and lead Dawn Askin completed their round-robin schedule with a 10-7 triumph over Switzerland’s Mirjam Ott Thursday night at the Gangneung International Ice Rink.
That gave Canada a 9-2 round-robin record, tied with Denmark’s Angelina Jensen. But the Danes finished second by virtue of their round-robin victory over Canada on Wednesday afternoon. They finished the round-robin with a 9-3 win over Deb McCormick of the United States.
“Getting in the one-two game would have been nice, but it was out of our control,” said Overton-Clapham. “We’re in the three-four game, we’re in the playoffs, and that was our goal coming in here. We’re happy with where we are. We’re still playing, and that’s good.”
Canada will play Sweden’s Anette Norberg (7-4) in the Page three-four game Saturday at 1 a.m. (curltv.com, all times Eastern), with the winner moving onto Saturday’s semifinal at 6 a.m. (TSN) against the loser of Friday’s Page one-two game between Denmark and China’s Bingyu Wang (7 a.m., curltv.com). China led the round-robin standings with a 10-1 record, winning 10 straight after losing its first game of the women’s worlds to Canada, including a 7-2 victory over Norway’s Marianne Rorvik on Thursday night.
The winner of the China-Denmark game goes through to Sunday’s championship final (2 a.m., TSN2; repeated at 7 p.m. on TSN).
Canada built a big lead early on the Swiss, going up 6-1 through four ends after scoring three in the first end, stealing one in the second and cracking a deuce in the fourth.
But Switzerland got back into the game by scoring a deuce in the fifth and three more in the seventh before Jones put the game away in the 10th with a short runback double takeout to score two.
“We’re pretty happy,” said Jones. “We came out and played really well at the beginning of that game and then kind of faltered a little bit, but we knew the game really didn’t matter at that point. We’re pretty happy with how we played that game and hopefully we’ll take some momentum into the playoffs.”