Jennifer Dodds and Bruce Mouat face the painful task of regrouping for a shot at Olympic bronze after losing their mixed curling semi-final in a 6-5 defeat to Norway at the National Aquatics Centre in Beijing.
The British pair looked in control for much of the match but it swung on a three-point Norwegian power-play in the sixth, which ultimately afforded Kristen Skaslien to roll in the decisive stone and clinch victory in the final end.
Mouat and Dodds did not hide their disappointment in the wake of the contest but immediately sought to shift focus onto Tuesday afternoon’s match against Sweden which will decide whether they make it onto the Olympic podium.
“We’re disappointed not to be in the final but there’s still a bronze medal to play for tomorrow,” said Dodds. “I think if we play like we did for the majority of that game it will be a really good fight against Sweden.”
Dodds and Mouat had lost their penultimate round-robin match to the Norwegians 24 hours earlier, but rebounded to secure a swift chance at revenge when they overcame the already-eliminated Americans on Monday morning.
They started strongly against their opponents, whom they had beaten to win the world title in Aberdeen last year, and led for more than half the match in what coach David Murdoch called their strongest passage of play in the tournament so far.
“It’s going to hurt, that one,” said Murdoch, who endured his own fair share of pain during three Olympic appearances as a player, including when he came up short in the men’s final against the USA in Sochi in 2014.
“It was a really well controlled game and they were doing everything we asked of them. It’s the best I’ve seen us play all week and for five ends we were clearly the better team.
“Unfortunately when it comes to the power-play, if you do have a couple of small errors you can easily lose three. And that was actually the deciding point of the game.”
We're disappointed not to be in the final but there's still a bronze medal to play for tomorrow, I think if we play like we did for the majority of that game it will be a really good fight against Sweden.
It was a missed take-out attempt by Dodds in the seventh that proved pivotal, handing the Norwegians the three, and when Britain could only respond with one in the next, Norway took the ‘hammer’ – or final stone advantage – into the last end.
“In mixed doubles it’s had to say you’re in control the entire game – mixed doubles is so hard to keep on top of things,” said Mouat. “The fact that we tried to make her play a really tough one in the last shows how resilient we were.
“We were basically trying to guard everything and they were trying to make the hits, so with Jen’s last we just needed to put it in a really good position to force Kristen into playing a really tough draw.
“But unfortunately we over-swept it a bit and gave her too much backing to play her draw, so we’re a little bit disappointed with how we handled that.”
