At the end of a week that has seen them continue their upward trajectory as they prepare for this season’s Winter Olympics, Scotland’s women put in another strong performance in the final, but ultimately had to settle for silver at the Le Gruyère AOP European Curling Championships in Finland.
Starting against the top seeds and so without the hammer, Rebecca Morrison, Jen Dodds, Sophie Sinclair and Sophie Jackson went toe to toe with Sweden’s 2018 Olympic champions through the first six ends of the title decider, but they were ultimately squeezed out 7-5, leaving them with mixed emotions.
“If you’d told us we were going to come away with a silver medal at the start of the week we’d have been pretty happy and obviously, it’s a tough one to take being in that final and not finishing the week off on a win, but we’re still delighted with the performances we put in,” said skip Sophie Jackson. 
The quartet, who had won bronze at this event a year ago, had needed considerable resilience and a bit of help from elsewhere to get into the top four and the play-off places.
However, in a competition played over an identical format to the Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina they could take great confidence from the way they finished the round-robin competition, then performed in the semi-final and final.
“We feel very lucky and grateful to have been able to qualify for the play-offs at this competition after what was quite a tough start to the week,” Jackson admitted.
“We weren’t really playing our best and we had to try to find a way to win some of those games, but we were able to turn it around in the latter half of the week and particularly going into those play-off games.
“Looking towards Cortina there’s a lot of learnings we can take from this week.
“We’ll go back to the NCA and we’ve got a couple of months before the Olympics now where we can just try to dissect the first half of the week in particular, but also take the positives from the latter part of it and look to replicate that in February.”
For the skip it was an especially challenging week, playing those decisive matches as she underwent personal heartbreak, but she felt that her team’s efforts had paid tribute to her grandfather who died midway through the competition. 
“It was a really tough week for me with my granddad passing away midway through the week,” said Jackson.
“I’d seen him in the hospital a couple of weeks before we headed out here, though and he was telling his nurses how it was very important to turn on the TV and watch us in the European Championships, so I know he’ll have been watching us from up there and he’ll have been very, very proud.”
Watch games on The Curling Channel
Watch the women’s final on the BBC iPlayer.
Team Mouat
Bruce Mouat (Skip)
Grant Hardie
Bobby Lammie
Hammy McMillan
Kyle Waddell (alternate)
Team Morrison
Rebecca Morrison
Jen Dodds
Sophie Sinclair
Sophie Jackson (Skip)
Fay Henderson (alternate)
Images: Scottish Curling
