Bruce Mouat credits sports psychologist for narrow GB curling win over Australia

Bruce Mouat credited a meeting with his team’s sports psychologist for helping narrowly avoid embarrassment in Great Britain’s curling mixed doubles preliminary round win over Australia on Friday.

Mouat and Jennifer Dodds blew a 6-1 advantage after four ends against the competition’s also-rans before rallying to sneak a 9-8 win in an extra end to take their win-loss record to 3-1 after four games.

Mouat, whose double take-out with the penultimate stone sealed victory, said: “I feel so much more confidence in myself and my abilities again. I spoke to my sports psychologist [Jess Thom] last night and I was just saying what I wanted to do and she put me back in the right head space.”

Opponents Dean Hewitt and Tahli Gill are making their debuts at the Olympics, although Hewitt’s father was lead on the Australian men’s team that competed in the 1992 Games when curling was a demonstration event.

They had lost their first four games but a three-point win with the hammer in the fifth end raised the prospect of a remarkable turn-around in fortunes, and a missed double-takeout by Dodds in the next sent the scores back level.

But Mouat kept his nerve with the hammer, or last stone advantage, in the extra end to maintain the strong start by the British pair, whose double-header against the Czech Republic and unbeaten Italy on Sunday could all but seal a semi-final place.

“If you said at the start of the competition that we would have beaten quite a lot of the teams you would have expected to be in the play-offs, we definitely would have taken that,” said Dodds.

“We know we still have tough opponents to come. We just need to keep playing our best but it’s going to be tough out there - I think any of the other teams can be fighting