Great Britain’s men’s curling team were forced to settle for Olympic silver after succumbing to the “perfect” game by decorated Swedish skip Niklas Edin at the National Aquatics Centre in Beijing.
David Murdoch paid tribute to the 36-year-old Swede, who slowly strangled the life of the British challenge and chiselled a 5-4 extra-end win that added gold to his two previous Olympic medals and five world championship titles.
“You saw there the perfect display of curling, and it’s something we’ve seen from him before,” said British coach Murdoch, a silver medallist himself in Sochi in 2014. “He’s just so clinical and when he makes shots like that he’s really tough to beat.
“The guys tried to ask big questions of him. We forced the pressure as much as as we could, trying to make mistakes and he didn’t make any of them. He’s won five championships and three Olympic medals and he is the greatest in history for me.”
British skip Bruce Mouat will take solace in being almost a decade younger than Edin, and has already started a storied rivalry with his Swedish counterpart.
Of 23 matches between the pair, Edin has won 13, including at the last World Championship in Calgary, although Mouat struck back to win the European final in Lillehammer and also scored a crucial one-point win in the group phase in Beijing.
“Niklas has had such an impressive career and he’s one of the best in curling history,” said Mouat. “He’s an example of what we can do in four years’ time – we just need to get to that point again but make the result different.”
“This result drives us forward, we’ve put in so much work over the last five years. We’ll be driving even harder to get that gold medal next time.”
Mouat’s buoyant team went into the final with the hammer advantage after finishing top of the round-robin phase, then brushed aside the United States in their last four clash to make it eight wins in a row.
But they were forced to settle for a single in the opening end and when Sweden responded with a two in the next it set the tone for a frustrating afternoon in which they would never regain the lead, and found themselves struggling to assert themselves against Edin’s relentless accuracy.
A steal in the third extended the Swedish lead despite a brilliant double take-out by Mouat that had given him a glimmer of a greater reward, and even a rare steal of his own by Mouat in the eighth only succeeded in dragging the score back level with Edin retaining control.
Britain could only take a one in the 10th which set up an extra end, when the Swedes drew on all their experience to force Mouat into attempting an improbable take-out with his final stone. When that came up inches short, it handed Edin victory.
The disappointment was palpable among Mouat’s team-mates, Hammy McMillan, Bobby Lammie, Grant Hardie and substitute Ross Whyte, who came together as a team four years ago and can ultimately take solace in the speed of their trajectory to the top of the sport.
“We’ll look back and be proud, but right now it is very raw,” said McMillan, whose father, also called Hammy, skipped the British team at the 2002 Salt Lake City Olympics and is a former world champion.
“We put this team together four-and-a-half-years ago to stand on top of that podium. The year and the last 18 months we’ve had, we felt we could have done that and we fell just a little bit short.”
