ESBJERG, DENMARK
March 20, 2011

The Danish hosts had their first win of the event in Sunday evening’s fifth session of round-robin play in the Capital One World Women’s Curling Championship, being staged in Esbjerg, Denmark, when Lene Nielsen and her team held their nerves to beat Canada’s Amber Holland by 8-5, when Holland’s attempted angled take-out went wrong.

While this was Denmark’s only game on Sunday, this was the second defeat of the day for Canada. In the earlier session, they had gone down by 4-9 to Russia Liudmila Privivkova. After this game, Russian skip Privivkova was full of praise for her lead player Ekaterina Galkina. “She had a great game and made every shot. It’s very important when the lead plays good”.

After her win in the later session, a delighted Danish skip Nielsen said, “we just went out there and gave it our all. We’ve never played Canada before”. For her part, Canadian skip Holland admitted, “this is probably not the start I wanted. I’d like to be more in the win column than in the loss, but it’s a long week and lots can happen”.

In the fifth session, both Germany and Norway lost their unbeaten records, Germany going down by 2-8 to Russia, while Norway were beaten 7-5 by the Czech Republic in an extra end.
Defending champion Andrea Schöpp was clear about what contributed to her loss, “we had a really bad start so we didn’t play very well. I think it was a problem for us to hang around all day and have no game. They already had an afternoon game and I think that’s a kind of advantage”.

Earlier, the Chinese had convincingly beaten Korea’s Shin Mi-Sung by 10-3. After her victory over Germany, Chinese skip Bingyu Wang said, “we had just won against Korea so we had to keep concentrated, so we just played the Chinese way – meaning it doesn’t matter who you play - just play against yourself”.

In the same session, Scotland’s Anna Sloan narrowly lost to Sweden’s Anette Norberg by 3-5 in a low-scoring game that was decided when Sloan just failed to pick out the Swedish shot stone with her last effort. Earlier, the Scots had beaten USA by 7-6 when USA skip Patti Lank missed a fairly open hit with her last stone. After this game, Sloan said, “to get a win out of that was pretty good. We knew we had to make her play her last shot and with the ice straightening up, her mistake was easier done than it looked”.

Switzerland’s Mirjam Ott won her only Sunday game, beating the Czech Republic by 9-3 in the fourth session.

Standings after 5 Sessions:
China 2-1
Czech Republic 2-1
Germany 2-1
Norway 2-1
Russia 2-1
Sweden 2-1
Switzerland 2-1
Canada 1-2
Denmark 1-2
Scotland 1-2
USA 1-2
Korea 0-3


RESULTS
Session 4: Scotland 7, USA 6; Canada 4, Russia 9; Korea 3, China 10; Switzerland 9, Czech Rep. 3.
Session 5: Denmark 8, Canada 5; Germany 2, China 8; Czech Republic 7, Norway 5 (extra end); Scotland 3, Sweden 5.