World Men’s Curling Championship 2019 Review

The Scottish Men were left feeling disappointed as their hopes of winning a medal at The Pioneer Hi-Bred World Men’s Curling Championship 2019 (WMCC) came to end when they narrowly lost out to an on form Canadian side in the qualification game.

It was the second time the Team Mouat rink of Bruce Mouat, Grant Hardie, Bobby Lammie and Hammy McMillan have represented Scotland at the at WMCC and this year they were joined by alternate, Ross Whyte; coach, Alan Hannah and national coach, David Murdoch.

Team Mouat won the Bronze Medal at last year’s WMCC in Las Vegas and had hoped to do better, but after beating Russia in their first game they had a run of bad luck losing three close encounters to Switzerland, Netherlands and USA and started falling away from the top of the standings.

The men had been playing well and their good form resulted in three good wins thereafter against Sweden, who were last year’s World Champions,  Korea and Norway. After defeating Norway, Bruce Mouat said, “We’re getting a few more breaks, we weren’t getting much in the first few games. We’ve got a tough one against Japan tonight, so if we can get a win there then we’re definitely back on track.”

Unfortunately, Scotland lost to Japan. They were then in the middle of the standings on 4 wins and 4 losses.

There were 4 games left to play; China, Canada, Germany and Italy. Grit, determination and spectacular shotmaking from the Scots saw them win all four games and qualify for the playoffs in sixth place. Bruce commented, “We knew what the situation was, and we were backs against the wall a little bit, but that was really good. If it is Canada (in the qualifier), we beat them in the round-robin and I don’t see why we can’t do it again.”

After the round robin, the first two placed teams went straight through to the semi finals and teams placed 3-6 played qualification games. Scotland played third placed, Canada, in a game which progressed the winner to the semi final and the losing side’s World Championship campaign was over. Bruce Mouat summed it up, “We’ve had to fight all week, and that was another fight for us. We didn’t come out as strong as we wanted to, we lost a couple of cheap-ish twos in the first three ends and it’s pretty tough to come back from that. As always, we seemed to be quite resilient and we were sticking together, and we managed to get back into the game. They don’t miss much, and they were playing really good curling.  It was just the story of our week, we weren’t really setting up right or getting our angles right.  I missed a few line-calls for the guys, so we’re just a bit disappointed.”

The Gold Medal was won by Sweden with Canada taking Silver, and Switzerland beat Japan to claim Bronze.

The whole of Scotland were behind Team Mouat at the WMCC and we hope this experience makes them stronger for future years.

Some other memories were made in Canada of course, as Bruce played his 100th Game for Scotland. “It feels surreal; I get to have my hundredth game for Scotland at the world men’s in Canada! So that’s literally one of the best moments for me in my career,” he said.

Thanks to sponsor, Plansafe Solutions, who won the right to have their logo featured on the Team’s shirts, as part of our inaugural Shirt Sponsor Raffle, held last year.

Final standings after the round robin (W-L)

Sweden 11-1

Switzerland 9-3

Canada 9-3

Japan 9-3

United States 8-4

Scotland 8-4

Italy 7-5

Germany 4-8

Russia 4-8

Netherlands 4-8

China 2-10

Norway 2-10

Korea 1-11