Eve Muirhead, Anna Sloan, Vicki Adams and Claire Hamilton, with Kay Adams as alternate and Gordon Muirhead as their coach, have their first game in this year's Le Gruyere European Championships against Norway, skipped by Linn Githmark. The Scots will take to the ice on Saturday, 12.30 local time. They have two games on the first day, facing Denmark in the evening.David Murdoch, Glen Muirhead, Ross Paterson and Richard Woods, with David Edwards as their fifth player and David Ramsay their coach, open against Joel Retornaz's Italians who had a good run at the Edinburgh International last weekend. Italy gained promotion to the A Division at Champery last year.
The draws can be downloaded from this page, alongside the details of all the competing teams.
The Scots flew out from Edinburgh this morning. I hope their journey will be much less eventful than last year when our representative teams faced considerable delays and frustrations caused by the bad weather on their way to Switzerland.
The World Curling Federation website has a full preview of the ECC 2011 here. Eight teams from the Women’s A Group will qualify for the Ford World Women’s Curling Championship 2012 in Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada, March 17-25, 2012. Teams already qualified for this event are Canada (as host), USA, China and Korea. Seven teams from the Men’s A Group at the ECC 2011 will qualify for the World Men’s Curling Championship 2012 in Basel, Switzerland, March 31 - April 8 2012. Teams already qualified for this event are Switzerland (as host), Canada, China and New Zealand. The Bemidji Curling Club will host a challenge between the United States and Brazil, January 27-29, for the final North American berth. This will be a best-of-five competition spread over the three days.
The draws and the competing teams in the B Divisions are available for download from this page. Such is the size of the Megasport Arena that all the B games will be held in that venue too.
The competition website, which will have a link to results, is here. And the TV and webcast schedule is here.
Top: The photo of the Megasport Arena in Moscow is from the WCF website here.
