MONCTON, N.B. April 11, 2009 (CCA) — For the second straight year, Canada’s Kevin Martin and Scotland’s David Murdoch will battle for a gold medal at the Ford world men’s curling championship.
Martin’s half-Edmonton (Martin, second Marc Kennedy, coach Jules Owchar), half-Calgary (third John Morris, lead Ben Hebert, alternate Terry Meek) foursome defeated Markus Eggler of Switzerland 6-5 Saturday at the Moncton Coliseum in the Ford worlds semifinal.
With the win, the defending world champs will play Scotland for the world title on Sunday at 7:30 p.m. (all times Atlantic) on TSN.
“You can’t win this thing unless you get to Sunday night,” said Martin. “So we’ve done all we can, we’re there, and let’s roll the dice and we’ll see.”
The victory snapped a two-game losing streak for the Canadians, who’d won their first 10 games in the round-robin before losing both their round-robin finale and the Page playoff one vs. two game to Scotland.
Canada and Switzerland played a close-to-the-vest first five ends before Canada broke it open with three in the sixth end. Kennedy made two perfect freezes to set up the end, and Martin made a delicate tap to remove a Swiss counter and be left with three counting stones.
“I think we wanted to make sure this game that we picked up on the ice and the rocks,” said Morris. “It hasn’t been a bad surface all week; we just haven’t picked up on it well enough, and we didn’t want that to be an excuse for why we bowed out of this thing.”
A year ago in Grand Forks, N.D., Martin won his first world championship by beating Murdoch 6-3 in the gold-medal game.
Martin booked his ticket to the final by breaking open a tight game with a delicate tap to score three in the sixth end against the Swiss, who’d earlier in the day knocked off Norway’s Thomas Ulsrud in the Page playoff three-four game.
With the loss, Switzerland drops into the bronze-medal game on Sunday at 1 pm on curltv.com against Norway.