- The Swiss curlers suffered two narrow defeats at the home World Championships in Schaffhausen on Thursday.
- Skip Schwaller’s team lost to Italy 5:6 in the afternoon, followed by a 7:8 defeat against Scotland in the evening.
- The two defeats represent a setback in terms of reaching the knockout phase.
After 5 wins in a row, things didn’t go as planned for the Swiss curlers on Thursday. In the two top games against Italy and Scotland, Pablo Lachat-Couchepin, Sven Michel, Yannick Schwaller and Benoît Schwarz-van Berkel had to leave the ice as losers.
In the evening game against Scotland, the Swiss made up for an early deficit with a three-man game in the 6th end and took the lead for the first time. The defending champions, led by Bruce Mouat, started the game with a three-man house. As a result, no team was able to record more than one stone per end.
With the right of the last stone, the Swiss would have needed a house of two in the 10th end to win the game. Schwarz-van Berkel managed to get a Scottish stone out of the house. However, the Swiss stone did not turn enough, so in the end there was only one Swiss stone shot.
In addition, the Scots, who secured early participation in the knockout phase after Sweden and Canada, used the last stone to win.
Bitter defeat against Italy
Against Italy, the Swiss were always behind in the afternoon until the 8th end, before they were able to take the lead for the first time thanks to a stolen stone. The Italian skip Joël Retornaz tried to remove the Swiss’s “shot” stone via his own guard, but was not successful in this attempt.
However, the Italians struck back in the 10th end. After a strong stone from Retornaz, Schwarz-van Berkel had the difficult task of placing the last stone in the center via an Italian one. However, this failed, so Italy was able to celebrate a 6-5 victory thanks to a stolen stone.
Direct advance to the semi-finals is no longer possible
Bypassing the quarter-finals and qualifying directly for the semi-finals as one of the best two teams in the round robin is no longer possible for the Geneva team. In the remaining games against Germany and Canada, the aim is to stay in the top 6 and in this way reach the knockout phase (quarter-finals). To do this they have to win one of the two games.
2024-04-04 22:02:46
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