SHUSTER’S OLYMPIC CHAMPS BEAT TEAM GB IN SHOOT OUT

Team GB went toe-to-toe in an all-action clash with defending Olympic champions, but after battling back from an early three shot deficit they were ultimately outscored 9-7 by John Shuster’s Americans in Beijing’s Ice Cube.

After a blanked opening end both teams showed a willingness to keep lots of stones in play from early on, resulting in twos being exchanged at the second and third ends, before the USA surged ahead with a three at the fourth.

Pinpoint accuracy throughout the fifth end saw the opportunity set up for Bruce Mouat to reduce the deficit by scoring a two at the fifth end and the British quartet came out even stronger after the midway break, applying pressure which drew a series of mistakes, culminating in Shuster failing to shift anything with an attempted double takeout with the last stone of the end, allowing a steal of two.

They set up another promising situation at the next end, but when Mouat’s attempt to draw a third shot into the house came up short, Shuster seized his chance to draw to the button in behind cover and when the Team GB skip’s attempt to remove it bounced off it, it was sufficiently open for his opposite number to shift it out of the four foot and lie two to reclaim the lead. 

Mouat was then slightly too heavy with his attempt to draw a second shot at the eighth, levelling the scores and after the Americans got the upper hand at the ninth end, Shuster could have ended the match there, narrowly failing with an attempted double takeout that would have registered a four, but he still scored two which proved decisive as his team ran their opponents out of stones at the last end.

“They played excellent and didn’t give us much, while we gave ourselves a little bit of work to do in that first half,” Team GB’s lead Hammy McMillan observed.

“We then came out in the second half, got a nice wee miss out of them which got us a steal of two and we had a couple of chances in the seventh and eighth which could have turned the game in our favour, but we didn’t capitalise on them.”

The defeat added extra importance to their second match of the day, against Stefan Walstad’s Norway.

“We know what they’re about,” said McMillan.

“We’ve played them many times now and they’re a strong outfit, but we’ve got a couple of gears to go and we’re going to come out firing to get that second win.”

For McMillan, there was the added disappointment of failing, on his 100th international appearance, to match his cousin Grant Hardie, who had reached the same landmark with a win the previous day, but Team GB’s vice skip has his eyes on bigger prizes.

“It’s nice to mark that on a special stage and I hope now we’ve passed that we can get a few more wins,” said Hardie.

“As long as we keep building into the week, we’ve got a very tough finish, so we need to pick up a few more.”

He knows that to do that they will need to take their chances better than they did against the Americans.

“After we slowly started to wrestle back control of the game it’s disappointing that we didn’t kick on and take our chances,” he said.

“However John Shuster does make an awful lot of shots and we knew that was what we’d be up against and we just never executed well enough.”