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Laycock survives thanks to dominant win

Jan 5, 2017 | 8:18 PM

Saskatoon skip Steve Laycock will live to fight another day after his 9-1 win over Heath McCormick of Blaine, U.S.A., on Thursday evening, to highlight the ninth draw of the Meridian Canadian Open.

“Just got off to a good start,” Laycock said. “[We] made a big hit and roll in the first, set up a deuce, and we avoided a few things. They had a few unlucky breaks just with the way the angles shook out in a couple of ends and we capitalized. So it was a game we controlled pretty well.”

Laycock said in his previous game against Reid Carruthers, that he lost 8-3 on Wednesday, the biggest issue was some of their shots were flat out misses, as opposed to partial ones.

“We were making as many full shots as we normally do, but our misses were all of the zero-to-five, not the partial shot variety and that’s where you get in trouble,” Laycock said. “[Today] we did a better job of that, finishing off shots on the stuff that we didn’t make. At least we were getting some positive outcome out of it.”

The do-or-die scenario is still in place for team Laycock for the remainder of the tournament, but Laycock said the focus can’t be on the big picture.

“You cant look at it as being got to win 5 in a row from here. Just got to take one shot at a time and stay in the moment,” he said. “I think we’re starting to get back to the stuff we normally do.”

Other games of note on Thursday’s final draw saw B.C.’s John Morris win 6-3 over Winnipeg’s Reid Carruthers, Winnipeg’s Mike McEwen triumph 8-7 over Edmonton’s Brendan Bottcher, and Newfoundland’s Brad Gushue take a 5-4 score over Greg Balsdon of Kingston.

Morris fell to McEwen in his first game, but got a big 9-3 win over Team McCormick in his second game earlier on Thursday.

He said the win over Team Carruthers was one of his team’s best games of the year.

“They’re a really strong team,” Morris said. “They’ve been really coming on the last few years so to play a great game against them like that shows some good character on our part.”

All three of those games were ‘B’ bracket matches, meaning the losers – Bottcher, Carruthers, and Balsdon – are now relegated to the ‘C’ bracket.

In the other Thursday night game, Tracy Fleury won big time, 8-2 over Chelsea Carey of Calgary to eliminate Carey from the tournament. Fleury will stay in the ‘C’ bracket, as it was her first win of the tournament.

 

Nathan Kanter is battlefordsNOW’s sports reporter and voice of the Battlefords North Stars. He can be reached at Nathan.kanter@jpbg.ca or tweet him @NathanKanter11