Assiniboia welcomes Weyburn Red Wings with open arms during ammonia shutdown
3h ago
Billets were found for all Red Wings players in just four hours.
Team Saskatchewan finally gave the hometown fans something to cheer about.
The Laycock rink was 0-2 going into their matchup against New Brunswick on Sunday night and feeling the crunch at the bottom of their pool after a 6-5 loss to Manitoba Sunday morning and a 5-2 loss to Quebec on Saturday.
“It’s nice to get a win finally,” admitted skip Steve Laycock. “We’ve played a little bit better each time we’ve been out so far and finally it turned into victory.”
The 9-4 win was even more exciting for third Matt Dunstone because it was his first win at his very first Brier.
“Got the monkey off the back,” he smiled. “I guess I got 112 more to go to catch Gushue and Martin and all the rest of the top guns, but I mean obviously it was a must-win for us considering the 0-2 start and hopefully this is the start of something big for us.”
The game was solidly in Saskatchewan’s control for nearly the whole game. After scoring two in the first end New Brunswick was able to lay three in the second, but after that, it was almost all Saskatchewan.
First, they scored two in the third end and were able to steal one in each of the three ends that followed to give them a healthy 7-3 lead.
New Brunswick came back to score one in the seventh end, but Saskatchewan sealed it by scoring two in the eighth and the teams shook hands without playing the final two.
“I think we just took a little while to figure out the ice and rocks,” Laycock said about their early struggles, shrugging off the idea that being the host province put extra pressure on them.
“The struggle that we were having early was no different than we would have any early event. Sometimes we get away with wins even when we’re playing that way but we didn’t here, we got punished a little bit.”
“Coming off that Carruthers game we thought we had played really well we thought we were on the right track,” added Dunstone. “We finally got some results for it tonight.”
Saskatchewan will have the chance to get back to .500 when they play PEI Monday afternoon and Dunstone feels that’s more than doable.
“We had that extra little precision that we wanted … and there’s no reason why we can’t carry that over into tomorrow.”