Great Britain’s women curlers survive tense finish to join men in semi-finals

Great Britain’s women’s curling team squeezed into the Olympic semi-finals by 10 centimetres as Eve Muirhead fashioned a great escape at the National Aquatics Centre in Beijing.

Muirhead, a bronze medallist in Sochi in 2014, went into the last match of the round-robin phase against the Russian Olympic Committee requiring at least three results to go her way in order to book a top-four spot.

The 31-year-old kept her side of the bargain with a brilliant double take-out in the penultimate end to score four and seal a 9-4 win, then waited nervously while Sweden beat South Korea in order to guarantee their place.

“We were in the mixed zone watching TV – I don’t think many of us could really watch the screen,” said team-mate Jennifer Dodds, who will now get a second shot at guaranteeing an Olympic medal after missing out in the mixed event.

“You never know and we were not 100 per cent sure. But when we got it confirmed it was more relief than anything else.”

Locked together with two other teams on a 5-4 win-loss record, Muirhead’s team advanced by virtue of the ‘draw shot challenge’ system – an average of the accuracy of the final pre-match draw shots played prior to every round-robin match.

It placed Great Britain in third place, ahead of Japan and Canada, the latter being eliminated, and set up a semi-final against Sweden on Friday.

“I wouldn’t call it luck,” insisted Muirhead, who has lost her two previous semi-finals in 2014 and 2018. “I thought we played very well out there today, and I know Switzerland and Sweden did as well.

“This is my third Olympic semi-final but I don’t want it to go the way 2018 went. It was tough but I believe in us as a team. All we can do is curl the way we have all week and if we carry on that