It’s Englot vs. Homan: Round 3

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This article was published 24/02/2017 (2610 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

ST. CATHARINES, Ont. — Going into the 2017 Scotties, the buzz of the week was Rachel Homan couldn’t be beaten. Then Manitoba defeated her in the round robin, and again one night later in the top Page playoff game.

Now Homan, the world’s top-ranked women’s curler, will be hoping third time’s a charm against Manitoba.

She will get her chance for a rematch, with everything on the line. The Ontario skip dispatched Northern Ontario’s Krista McCarville 7-5 in Saturday’s semifinal, which booked her ticket to today’s 6:30 p.m. CST championship match.

There, Michelle Englot and Team Manitoba are waiting. The Manitobans will hold the hammer, which they used to their advantage against Homan in the 1-vs.-2 game. But Homan doesn’t plan to let the final end the same way.

“Hopefully, it’ll be a good game for the fans,” she said, after shaking hands with McCarville. “They’ve been playing great all week. I think she played 100 per cent against us the other night. So we’re going to have to be the same.”

It wasn’t 100 per cent, to be clear, but Team Manitoba did soar into the final with a superb performance in the 1-vs-2 Page. Both their wins over Homan here can be credited to aggressive play; now, they’ll have to do it again.

“We know how well we have to play to beat her,” Englot said of Homan. “Teams do get the upper hand on other teams now and then, and yeah, there can be that mental block. But we don’t want to take anything for granted.”

Perhaps McCarville’s Thunder Bay rink deserved a better end to this Scotties. They played well this week and were near-perfect over Chelsea Carey in Saturday afternoon’s 3-vs.-4 Page playoff, shooting 93 per cent as a team.

In fact, McCarville steamrolled Carey 8-1 that game, halting the Winnipeg-raised skip’s defence of her 2016 Canadian title in nine ends. (Incredibly, McCarville only held hammer once that whole time; seven of her points were stolen.)

Against Homan, that train derailed early. McCarville’s two second-end misses were costly; the second one left Homan lying three. With hammer, the Ontario skip made a pretty in-off to seize the opportunity, and vault into a 4-0 lead.

McCarville got on the scoreboard with a deuce in the third, but after that Homan controlled the play. After a couple of blanks, Homan built her own lead with a fifth-end deuce. They kept the house clean to limit McCarville’s chances.

Even when Homan’s last shot of the eighth wrecked on a guard, handing McCarville a steal of one, it didn’t make much of a difference. Ontario carried a 6-4 lead into the ninth, and ran Northern Ontario out of rocks in ten.

It’s not that Northern Ontario played badly; they shot 92 per cent as a team, the same as Homan’s rink. If they hadn’t had that stumble in the second end, the game might have gone a whole other way. But that’s all hypothetical, now.

‘We know how well we have to play to beat her… we don’t want to take anything for granted’–Manitoba skip Michelle Englot

“One slight misshot, or one bad angle, and they can throw that weight that can blast three, four rocks out,” McCarville said, after the loss. “Unfortunately, that four-ender that they got, we didn’t get our rocks in the right place.”

Northern Ontario will still look to get on the podium; they’ll play Carey at 1:30 p.m. CST today for a bronze medal.

So, can Manitoba make it three in a row? Homan smiled a bit, when asked if any team had done that before: “I’m sure lots of teams have at least three wins on us,” she said, though she conceded maybe not in a row.

More to the point, that’s not how results happen. Odds and matchups are one thing; you still have to perform.

“It doesn’t really matter what happened before,” Homan said. “Whoever comes out the strongest is going to win tomorrow. So it all comes down to tomorrow, and whoever’s on their game in that moment.

“They’re a strong team, and I’d like to think we are too,” she continued. “So it’s going to come down, hopefully, to the last rock, and it’ll be exciting for fans, and we’re going to bring our A-game for sure.”

melissa.martin@freepress.mb.ca