Brad Jacobs: "That was horrible curling"

Never one to mince words, Brad Jacobs summed up his team's performance at the Canada Cup on Sunday to the Sault Star's Peter Ruicci in one short sentence: "That was horrible curling."

Hard to disagree. The reigning Olympic champions were lambasted by Mike McEwen in the final by an 8-3 margin. McEwen's Winnipeg four took two in the first and stole three more in the second for a 5-0 lead no doubt sending lots of folks over to watch Gotham. 

Jacobs seemed to have a tough time reading the ice and was heavy with his final-rock draw in the second. That led to the early lead for McEwen.

That was horrible curling, as bad as it gets,” Jacobs said when reached via cell phone minutes after the match had ended. 

“It's terrible it happened on television.” 

Asked about the difficulty in reading the ice, Jacobs said: “That was definitely one of the problems. The ice tricked all of us a little bit.”

For McEwen, it marked the sixth win in seven events, a ridiculously fast start. As well as they played, the skip noted that getting five points in the first two ends was a shock, as he told Canadian Press. 

"That was a gift," McEwen said of the steal and the 5-0 advantage. "That's not going to happen against a team like that very often, it might not happen again for years. It just shows that being off just a little bit, whether it's a few extra feet of weight or a few inches of line can dramatically swing a game."

In the women's final, Val Sweeting put on a finishing kick to knock off Rachel Homan's team scoring three points in the last two ends for a 6-3 win. The skip gushed cliches to the Canadian Press after the win. 

"A great team game, probably our strongest game all week, start to finish and from lead to skip," said Sweeting after high-fiving part of the large crowd of supporters from her hometown of Vegreville, Alta., just east of Edmonton.

Of course there's more to this story with Sweeting's former teammate Joanne Courtney jumping over to join the Homan squad in the off-season and also the sudden line-up change for Sweeting as well. As Don Landry points out at Yahoo.ca, it's been a strange year for Sweeting. 

It's an amazing story line. Sweeting loses the 2014 Scotties to Homan. Sweeting's teammate, Joanne Courtney, leaves for Homan's squad. Sweeting adds seven time New Brunswick champ Andrea Crawford. Crawford abruptly leaves the team just before The Masters begins at the end of October. Sweeting wins that event, anyway, with Cathy Overton-Clapham at vice, as Olson-Johns wasn't available to join the team at that point. 

As Landry points out, it's probably not the last time these two sets of teams will face off in big contests.