After another run to the latter stages of a Grand Slam event, Bruce Mouat has made a near 2000 kilometre trip across country to re-join his regular teammates as they prepare for the defence of their Masters title against the world’s best teams in Oakville Ontario.
Less than 48 hours after he and Jen Dodds contested the semi-final of the Winnipeg Open Mixed Doubles on Sunday, Mouat is due to be back in action alongside Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan for a return to the scene of one of the victories that helped them become the first ever Scottish winners of The Pinty’s Cup as the leading team in Grand Slam events last season. 
Their defence of that title got off to a difficult start as they were forced to re-shuffle their line-up for The National and The Tour Challenge in October due to a serious hand injury suffered by powerhouse sweeper Lammie.
However, they demonstrated that they were back to something close to the form which also took them to the top of the world rankings for the first time at the beginning of this year when they completed a hat-trick of European Championships title wins on their third appearance at that event and believe they are now ready to show what they are capable of once more.
“We’re looking forward to getting going in Oakville and trying to re-create what we did last year when we won the event,” said Mouat.
“I’m really excited to see what we can do with the boys this week.
“Coming off the Europeans the morale in the team is pretty high.
“With our slower start to our season, having the European Championships towards the end of the first half of the season it meant a lot for us to really go out and show that we are a really strong team and moving back to world number three is very encouraging for us because we had been falling a little at the start of the season. 
“So I’m glad we got some ranking points at the Europeans and are climbing a wee bit again. We’ve got a tough few games this week, so we’ve got to try to focus on re-creating what we did at the Europeans and that will hopefully see us win a few games.”
While he has taken on a challenging personal schedule in Canada this month, with another Mixed Doubles Grand Slam event following on directly after this week’s competition, Mouat is revelling in the environment and was pleased that he and Dodds performed well together more than two months after they contested their only other event of the season together when they won the first Grand Slam of the season.
“I enjoyed being back with Jen and we were obviously playing decent,” said Mouat.
“I wouldn’t say it was our finest competition, but to make it to the semi-final in what was a really strong field, we’re very happy with that, so there were a lot of positives to be taken from the weekend.
“Now moving onto the men’s game and playing another Grand Slam, which is always very exciting. These events are so much fun to play in when you get to play against the best teams in the world on some of the best ice.”
And going in as European Champions carries even more kudos because, in what would have been an unimaginable scenario only a few years ago, there are more European than Canadian teams competing this week. 
“It’s always quite exciting to see how all the European teams do in these Slams and in recent years they’ve done very well,” Mouat observed.
“We’ll also see how our fellow Scots fare this week and hopefully some of us will be in the mix towards the end of the weekend.”
They are joined in The Masters line-up by Team Whyte who beat Mouat’s men to The Swiss Cup title which featured most of the top teams from across the Continent last month, then followed that up with a tournament win in Canada.
Having maintained a place in the top 10 in the world rankings for much of this year, they consequently believe they are ready to make a breakthrough at Grand Slam level.
“Winning events recently is a good confidence boost and puts us in a good position to put a charge in this week,” said their skip Ross Whyte.
“We love the Grand Slam events so going deep in this one would be a great end to 2022. 
“We are playing well and hopefully that translates into a good week here. The Grand Slam of Curling events are becoming a lot more European dominant so when we managed to win in Basel that made us really believe we can come to these events and put in good runs.
“It’s good to see so many European teams breaking into the Slam circuit and we hope we can be one of the many teams that go far in these events”
Please click here for results (6-11 December).
PHOTOS: GSOC Masters 2021 images: Sportsnet @photovagrant
Team Whyte: Roland Beck
