Both defending champions were successful as Perth’s Eve Muirhead and Aberdeen’s Tom Brewster won their finals in the Co-operative Funeralcare Scottish Curling Championships in Perth on Sunday.
Eve Muirhead and her team of lead Claire Hamilton, second Vicki Adams and third Anna Sloan beat Lockerbie’s Hannah Fleming 8-4 in yesterday morning’s final.
This was a fourth national title for Muirhead, and she had to come from behind to do so, as it was Fleming who took the first advantage, scoring two in the fifth with a nose-hit for a half-time 4-2 lead.
However, the second half was all pressure from Muirhead and Fleming faltered.
In the sixth, Fleming rolled out on a difficult double attempt, leaving Muirhead to draw for three. After this Muirhead had single steals in each of the next three ends.
In the seventh, Fleming had a complete miss on a take-out, in the eighth she hit but didn’t stay and, in the ninth, she over-threw her last draw.
Muirhead ran Fleming out of stones in the tenth with a bold double take-out, and now goes on to lead her team in the blue of Scotland at the World Women’s Championship, in Riga, Latvia next month.
Fleming, reigning Scottish junior champion, now has the consolation of going on to defend her world junior title at the World Junior Championships in Sochi, which start at the end of this month.
Muirhead said: “It was a game of patience out there. We were two down at half time but we came out with a pretty solid 100% second half.
“We knew we were going to get our chances and we managed to come up with that big three. The ice got a little faster and straighter. We figured that out before them and that’s where the experience shows up.”
With new team member David Murdoch skipping, Tom Brewster’s Aberdeen team of David Murdoch, Greg Drummond, Michael Goodfellow and fifth member Scott Andrews, who sat out the final, carved out their third successive national title when they beat Stirling’s Logan Gray 8-4 in the men’s final.
As well as handing new team member David Murdoch, who skipped throughout the week, his sixth national title, this win means that Brewster’s team are the only rink to win three successive titles in modern times.
They now go on to represent Scotland at the Ford World Men’s Curling Championships, which start in Victoria, Canada, at the end of March, hoping to go one better than the two silvers from the last two world championships.