European Curling Championships 2014

So we are just about to head off to Switzerland for the European Curling Championship! This is our first go at representing Scotland on the men's international scene after what feels like years and years of trying to get there.

In preparation for the event we had a training day at Curl Aberdeen last Sunday with everyone that would be travelling out with us. We established what we were doing at the pre-game and pre-tournament practices and played a few fun games between ourselves.

As well as this, a short phsyio session with Maggie Bush was organised so she had an idea of the physical mess she would be inheriting the responsibility for in Champery. We were supposed to have 15 minutes each, but as John is generally falling to pieces, he managed to burn through the entire teams time himself. 

We got all of the playing kit and off ice gear on Sunday which was handy.

We have had Team Edwards cards made for the European Championships to dish out throughout the course of the week. Team Edwards superfan, Rory Byers, was first in the queue to get a hold of the much sought after card. He has the goal to get all of the teams signatures by the end of the season so he has a valuable piece of curling memorabilia for the future. With the most valuable signature already acquired, he is well on his way to achieving this goal. 

Created by Graphic Designing superstar, Stuart McLachlan.

Unfortunately for Rory, when the team is in Switzerland we are going to be signing all of the cards anyway. 

We have got the flights booked going from Aberdeen-Amsterdam-Geneva. I have checked, they are for November 19th 2014. Which is the day, month and year we want to go. But after the issues we experienced with the flights going to Russia, here is evidence to put everyone's mind at ease.

Billy is heading out with the girls from Edinburgh and we will meet up with the rest of the crew in Amsterdam for the final leg!

We are staying at the Le Beau-Sejour hotel which sounds pretty French and is looking pretty awesome.

The schedule of play can be found HERE. We are straight in at the deep end against the current world champions from Norway.

The Eurosport schedule says that our game against Germany will be shown on Monday 24th November at 1pm on Eurosport 1. There are then one hour of highlights at 5pm the same day on Eurosport 2. The World Curling TV youtube channel will probably be showing more of games over the course of the week which can be found HERE.

At the moment there are two of our games being streamed on youtube.

Draw 2: Scotland vs Denmark
Draw 5: Scotland vs Germany

Thanks very much to all of the sponsors that have given us support and stuff over the last couple of weeks in the run up to the event! It has been a great help!

So wish us luck when we are out there please! We will try our best!

Cheers
Team Edwards
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Edinburgh International

Last weekend we competed in the Edinburgh International Curling Championship. We were attempting to retain our title as we won the trophy and all of that lovely, lovely money last year.

This year our group contained;

Jaap Van Dorp - Netherlands
SHAWZER - Scotland
Paul Stevenson - Scotland
Kalle Kiiskinen - Finland

Team photo!

Overall, the curling we produced over the course of the weekend was pretty forgettable. We lost to Van Dorp in the first game and then had a lot of time to kill before our second game later that evening. We decided that we were going to do some ten pin bowling to entertain ourselves. Prior to that, John had to pick up a new van for work.

Red van man

We played 3 games of ten pin bowling. For Scott and Dave, a lot of similarities between their peeling techniques and ten pin bowling techniques could be found. Pretty much, Dave was boring, controlled and weak while Scott came out swinging but was ridiculously erratic. A wee snipet of how things went is shown below.

There was a significant division in results between the front end and the back end. John and Dave were really not very good while Scott and Billy dominated and were tied at the top.

After the ten pin bowling, we played some doubles in pool. Dave & Billy teamed up against John & Scott. It was an extremely tight series with both teams tied at 6 games a piece with one game to go. Things were looking very bad for John & Scott coming towards the tail end of the final game. This was until Scott came to the table. He cleared up 5 balls and left himself with a straight forward shot on the black for the victory to claim the series. In what Billy described as "one of the worst misses I have ever seen", Scott bottled it and rattled the jaws to hand the championship to Dave & Billy. Chopper.

All the excitement of the ten pin bowling and pool was too much for Dave and had worn him out. To be sure he was in peak shape for the final game of the day, he thought he would catch a couple Z's before heading onto the ice against SHAWZER. We obviously took a photo. 

It was a pretty ropey game but we got our first win. We were staying at the Barr household for the weekend as John has done a phenomenal job of not getting dumped yet. Caitlin was also up for the weekend, but because Jane and Bob had A-listers staying, she was rightfully shunted to the caravan!

She was allowed into the house for the group brushing of teeth. 

We got up on the Saturday morning and experienced the industrial style jet wash of a shower that the Barr's have. It is so good. We had a couple games on the Saturday, the first was against Paul Stevenson who had hired John Hamilton to stand in for him at skip. We dug a massive hole for ourselves after 5 ends but we managed to take a 4 in the 6th to tie it up and set ourselves up for the win. Our last game was against Kiiskinen from Finland which we lost. Because of that, we had 4 end tie breaker against Kiiskinen again. Which we also lost. That was curtains for us as we were eliminated in the group stages.

It was not the end of the weekend for us though as we took the opportunity to socialise and have a couple beers. This carried on back at the Barr's where the activities got a wee bit too much for some people.

KO

Thanks to Jane and Bob for hosting us over the weekend! It is much appreciated!

Cheers
Team Edwards
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