Fenton's Here I Come

I've visited every curling rink in Scotland but, to my embarrassment, I have never set foot in England's sole dedicated curling facility, Fenton's Rink in Kent.

That will be rectified this weekend as I plan to visit the rink when the Four Nations is on. I'll have my camera with me, of course.

It's not that I haven't followed our sport south of the border. The Scottish Curler featured a monthly column from John Brown in the seven years when I was Editor, and John continues to keep us up to date on what's happening in Toothy Tales. Recently he posted extensively from Prague at the European Junior Challenge. I was interested in how the English juniors performed. I met them when they played at the Lockerbie Junior event in December.

Minnie Garnier has sent me the photo below of some of the English youngsters, on their return from competing in Prague. The girls came sixth and the boys ninth, under the guidance of their coaches John Brown and Greg Dunn. They were sponsored by Kent Reliance Building Society.

The teams were: Girls - Anna Fowler (skip - not in photo as she was already back at university), Hetty Garnier, Naomi Robinson, Lauren Pearce and Angharad Ward. Boys - Ben Fowler (skip), Harry Mallowes, Ben Alexander (not in photo as back at uni), Oliver Kendall and Matt Spicer. Photo courtesy of Minnie Garnier.

A rink is only as healthy as its juniors, as I've said before, so every success to the growth of junior curling at Fenton's.

Now, I know what your next question will be. And no, I've not yet visited the Deeside Leisure Centre in Queensferry, Wales. However, I did find this recent YouTube footage here, which gives an idea of what it is like.

What else is there to follow this weekend? The second weekend of the Bruadar Scottish Men's Qualifiers is on in Perth. But only for Section A. Section B is on NEXT weekend. The draw, the results and the standings can be found here.

The Glynhill Ladies' International is at Braehead. Chistine and Hugh Stewart are the 'guest bloggers' for this. The event website is here.

Team North America with the Continental Cup. Photo credit: CCA/Michael Burns. Lots more photos here.

I haven't mentioned on the blog that Team World got completely flattened by North America in last weekend's Continental Cup. I did try to watch some of this from Aberdeen, but had no success in getting the webcast to work either with Firefox or with Safari on my Mac. Sandy Morton on Millport watched some of it and says it became embarrassing, so maybe it is as well that I couldn't connect. (Athough I would value some tech input into why I was unable to.)

Here are a couple of links which might give you a flavour. I enjoyed reading the Curling Librarian's behind-the-scenes thoughts and photos from the event here.

And World Curling TV now has its own YouTube channel. See here for an example, or click on the image below.

But do explore all the WCTV YouTube offerings (see here). Lots of archive footage is going up. I expect I'll be spending some time looking at it all in the weeks ahead!

Speaking of David Murdoch, his team (just who will no doubt become clear) is competing in the Casino Rama Skins event in Ontario. This is the big money competition which his team won last year. Murdoch v world champion Kevin Koe is one semifinal on Saturday. The battle of the sexes is the other, matching Kevin Martin against Cheryl Bernard, see here.

Juggling the calendar

I made the mistake earlier this month of trying to be organised! I sat down with my diary and the RCCC Competitions Calendar to work out where I might be travelling to next season. No sooner than I had done that, the dates of the Scottish Junior Championships were changed (they are now Jan 12-16). The reason for the change was to avoid a clash with the World University Games.

However, that change had a consequence, and the second leg of the Scottish Men's Championship had to be moved to January 21-23. As many of our top junior teams also play in the Scottish it makes sense not to have the Junior Championship dates clashing with the Scottish Championship.

No problem, you might think. But this weekend of January 22-23 is the Casino Rama Skins event in Ontario. David Murdoch and his team won this last year, see here, and he has been invited again with the team who were the World Champs in 2009. That's them above in action in Rama. There was originally no clash of dates, as January 22-23 had been a free weekend in the schedule. Now it wasn't. That gave the RCCC Events and Competitions Committee a problem. They have solved this by splitting the second leg of the Scottish Qualifiers in two, January 21-23 AND January 28-30. Presumably, if any of the Murdoch team have reached this stage of the Scottish, they will get to play their games on January 28-30.

Colin Hamilton explains, "The Qualifiers weekend two has been split into two weekends because we changed our original dates from the 14 -16 to the 21-23 Jan. David Murdoch had already confirmed to the TSN skins that he was available to play 22-23 Jan, a free weekend. So to be fair on David we have split the weekends."

I don't imagine that this has been much fun for the Royal Club's Events and Competitions Committee which comprises Pat Edington (Convener), Colin Hamilton (Manager of Events and Competitions), Bob Kelly (Board), Anne Malcolm (Board), Jim Jamieson (ASC Representative), Alan Durno (ASC Represetnative), William Arnot (ASC Representative), Anne Donald (ASC Representative), Sadie Anderson (LSC Representative), Leslie Ingram-Brown (Convener Umpires’ Committee), Moray Combe (Player’s Representative (Men) and Brenda Macintyre (Player's Representative (Ladies). Ex-officio are the President, Vice President and CEO. On one hand they would want to be supportive of our country's top players who have been invited to compete in one of Canada's most prestigious competitions. On the other hand they face criticism for apparently demeaning the importance of the Scottish Championship, in favour of allowing a team (which no longer exists as David and Ewan are skipping different teams this coming season) to take part in a televised extravaganza for their own financial benefit.

The problems all stem from trying to juggle the calendar. I've thrown away my first attempt on my own diary for next season with all its scorings out, and will await things to settle! One thing is sure though, it will be a busy time next season. The current version of the competitions calendar is here.

The pic is a Curling News photo by Anil Mungal.

Murdoch skins the Canadians

David Murdoch and his team will undoubtedly be happy this morning!

Not only did they beat Kevin Martin's side for the fourth time in a row...

... but they won the final too, skinning Randy Ferbey completely at the Casino Rama Skins in Ontario.

Read the story on The Curling News blog here. And there's lots more, including videoclips, here.

These great pics are Curling News photos by Anil Mungal. Thanks Anil.