Canadian curling women require extra end to book world semifinal date with Norway | CBC Sports

Gritty. Tenacious. Plucky. It sums up Saturday’s 6-4 extra-end win over Japan, putting Canada skip Kerri Einarson’s women’s team in an 11 a.m. ET semifinal against Norway at the world curling championships in Sandviken, Sweden.

Vice-skip Val Sweeting, second Shannon Birchard, lead Briane Harris and Einarson scored two in the decisive 11th end to book a date with Norwegian skip Marianne Roervik at Goeransson Arena.

“It’s been a bit of a gritty week with ups and downs, but we’ve put ourselves in a good position now,” Sweeting told Curling Canada. “We just have to keep rolling and keep our opportunities coming. If we set ourselves up and capitalize, I think we’ll be good. We’re comfortable in this situation.”

In the extra end, Canada froze onto Japan’s second-shot stone, eliminating an easy path for its opponent to remove it and forcing skip Satsuki Fujisawa to play a challenging raise. It left Einarson and company sitting two with no need to throw its last.

“That was a pistol draw. I found that the ice was quick for the front end, but then it was even faster for Kerri and I, the fastest we’ve seen in some of those spots,” Sweeting said. “I felt like I was crawling out of the hack and it was still in. We know that going forward and how fast it will be, so we know we need to leave it to our brushers because they’ll get it there.”

In the other qualification game, Sweden’s Anna Hasselborg topped Italy’s Stefania Constantini 4-3 and will play Silvana Tirinzoni’s undefeated squad from Switzerland in the second semifinal, also at 11 a.m.

Missed opportunities

The winners advance to Sunday’s gold-medal match at 9 a.m. ET, while the losing squads compete for bronze at 4 a.m.

With ice conditions changing throughout the Canada/Japan game, the Canadians missed opportunities for multiple-point scores early on, including a crotch double under-curl in the fourth and a rollout in the fifth.

“We got caught a couple of times where the weight and throw were good and it would just run,” said Sweeting, whose team finished third overall in the round-robin standings with a 7-5 record. “We really had to pay attention to the paths and how they played. At the end of the game, it flipped. If you threw a path that had been straight but hadn’t been played in a while it curled a bit. It was one of those gritty wins.”

Canada received a shot in the arm in the sixth during a topsy-turvy end in which Japan went from attempting to score two to giving up a steal of one. Team Fujisawa tried to come in off its stone in the eight-foot and into a Canadian stone sitting second shot. Japan hit it too thick and nudged Canada’s stone further into the button to score. 

“[Fujisawa] was playing a hard one, so I said to Kerri we may get out of this end with a force, then we can regroup because we’re right in this thing. We battled and we fought hard,” Sweeting said. “That was a huge swing.”

WATCH | Einarson talks worlds on CBC Sports’ ‘That Curling Show’:

That Curling Show: Kerri Einarson ready to take on the curling world in Sweden

Fresh off her fourth straight Scotties title, the skip joins That Curling Show to talk about what makes her team so dominant, having her kids be able to watch the final and how she’s prepping for worlds.