Jennifer Jones and Canada rebounded Sunday with a 9-6 win over Sweden to place third at the Ford World Women’s Curling Championship in Swift Current.
The loss snapped a two-game losing streak for Canada after dropping the 1-2 Page playoff to Germany and Saturday’s semi-final to Scotland.
Canada scored four in the sixth end to break the game open and take a 7-2 lead. The win appeared to be all but wrapped up at that point but Sweden answered right back in the next end with three points after Jones hit and stuck with her final rock leaving Ostlund an simple nose hit for three. Sweden stole one more in the eighth to pull within one point at 7-6 before Jones replied in the ninth end with a draw to the button with backing to score two and take a 9-6 lead to the final end where Sweden ran out of rocks.
“I am pretty happy to be on the podium. I thought we bounced back and played well today,” said Jones, who’s team curled 89 percent compared to Sweden’s 79 percent in the win. “I thought we had a couple of bad ends. It was a nice way to finish off the week, a medal is nice.”
Canada placed first in the round robin with a 10-1 record but lost two of their final three games to place third.
“Our team always peaks in the playoffs. So a couple of world championships we don’t but this team is a playoff team and I think that is one thing that we have learned how to do. We have finally figured out the round robin so maybe we put them both together next year,” replied Jones when asked how her team can peak in the playoffs in the future.
“We are pretty happy with how we played. I think that everybody is just overanalyzing it a bit too much. We came out with a medal and had a great robin robin. We played great, I think we are pretty proud of that,” she said in defense of her team in the face of intense media scrutiny.
“We obviously didn’t play well last night and had a hard time sleeping. But we wanted to come out here and win a medal. We wanted to come out here and have fun and enjoy the atmosphere. Swift Current was amazing and to have one more game on the ice in front of the crowd was great. We are pretty happy to be on the podium, third in the world is not so bad.”
