A first tournament win on the men’s senior tour has set up British Curling’s Team Craik perfectly for their Grand Slam of Curling top tier debut when they head back to Canada next month.
James Craik, Mark Watt, Angus Bryce and Blair Haswell came through the triple knockout event unbeaten at the Grand Prix Bern Inter Curling Championships, beating compatriots Team Waddell in the semi-finals to set up what was, for their skip, a re-match of the 2022 World Junior Championship final against a team led by Germany’s Benny Kapp. 
The final was a hard fought battle with the Germans leading most of the way after stealing a two at the opening end, but having trailed by two shots at three different stages, the Scots drew level with a two at the sixth end, then forced their opponents at the next before scoring a two at the last to claim the lead for the first time and secure a 7-6 win.
“We’ve had an awesome week with strong performances from the start, right up until the final, which was a really great game against our friends Team Kapp from Germany,” said Craik.
“This was ideal preparation for us going into our first Tier One Slam which we fly out for next week.
“We’re really excited to finally get over the hurdle and win our first men’s tour title, get a little bit of cash and more importantly the ranking points to try to help push towards the December Slam now which is our new target.
“We’ve been around the ball park a couple of times, but this was our first final and then our first win, so we like the success rate there.”
Having made two previous visits to Canada this season, Craik’s men have earned their opportunity to join with British Curling colleagues Team Mouat, the World and European champions and Team Whyte in mixing with the best in the sport at the Kioti National by forcing their way up the world rankings with consistent performances throughout this season. 
That included reaching the knockout stages of the Tier Two event at the last Grand Slam of Curling gathering at Niagara last month.
“We’re super excited to get out there and get onto the big stage,” said Craik.
“We got a taste for it last week at Niagara at the Tier Two event where we again had a good week before coming up just a little bit short in the quarter-finals.
“It doesn’t get much bigger than this on tour, so we’re hoping to continue this kind of form and put out some good performances against the world’s best.”
While another trans-Atlantic trip, so soon after their last, will be challenging, the skip reckoned they could draw additional confidence from the way they handled the travelling that was required ahead of performing as they did in the Swiss capital.
“We’ve re-set really well and dealt with the jet-lag in spite of having only 48 hours at home before flying out to this event and we managed to deal with the fatigue really professionally and didn’t let it affect our performance at all, which is nice,” he said.
“We’re always progressing. We’re a really hard-working team and we have a lot of other commitments as well as curling, to try to basically allow us to curl. 
“So while doing our best with that we’re also managing to compete and put great performances out there with all the training and hard work the guys are putting in.
“We learned a lot out in Niagara, up against some tough Canadian opposition and also in our two competitions in Canada at the start of the season.
“Bringing that to our European opposition was valuable because we managed to come out on top, which was really great.”
It was also an encouraging weekend’s work for Team Waddell who had also begun the event well to progress to the A-route final, before suffering defeats in that match to Germany’s Sixten Totzek and in the B-route semi-final to Kapp.
They duly recovered well to come through two tough matches against the USA’s Team Ruohonen and the host nations Team Iseli, to qualify for the knockout stages through the C-route, where they gained revenge over Totzek with a commanding 9-3 win, before losing 6-3 to Craik in the semis and they were just squeezed out of a podium finish, losing 5-4 to Switzerland’s Team Brunner in the third place play-off.
