Jeff Stoughton’s Manitobans haven’t been stoking up this kind of curling conflagration at the Tim Hortons Brier since 1999.
“Holy smokes!” exclaimed Kevin Martin, who lost his second game of the piece on Wednesday night at the John Labatt Centre to the Manitoba brushfire. “I hope they cool down!”
Stoughton’s team of Jonathan Mead, Reid Carruthers and Steve Gould stole two in the third end for a 3-0 lead and “we were just ripping everything”.
“The peels were working,” said Stoughton. “Jon was making every double and every runback. It was a simple game but we sure played well.”
So well that a perplexed Olympic gold-medal winner threw in the towel trailing 5-1 without throwing his last rock of the eighth end. He looked like a guy crawling out of the wrong end of a shooting gallery.
“I had nothing,” said Martin. “Dead. I couldn’t get a deuce. I had to get a deuce. The best it was going to be was 6-1. It’s called ‘Time to pull the Velcro’.
The Stoughton team was scored at a collective 97 per cent. The last time a team scored that high at the Brier was Wayne Middaugh’s 2001 crew. Stoughton was the first Brier skip to score 100 per cent since Martin in 2009 and Glenn Howard in 2008.
But it was Mead who made all the spectacular shots.
“Jon was on fire,” said Stoughton. “Anything they threw at us, he threw something back at them.
Click for full story at the Canadian Curling Association website.