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Wednesday, 13 February, 2002, 01:42 GMT
British men suffer at Swedish hands
By BBC Sport Online's Mike Haggerty in Salt Lake City
Hammy McMillan's men went down by 2-7 against world champion Peter Lindholm to give Britain an unwelcome double against Swedish opposition on the second day of play in the Olympic curling event.
Before this, Rhona Martin's women lost out to four-times world champion Elisabet Gustafsen by 4-7.
The men's game was a tight affair, with four blank ends in the first half as the teams tested each other.
Eventually McMillan forced Lindholm to take a single in the third end, but Lindholm then returned the compliment in the sixth end, to make the score a miserly one each.
Before this McMillan had a chance to score two in the fifth end, but his draw was too strong and rolled right through the house, leaving him with no real option but to blank the end with his last shot.
In the seventh end, Britain's third player Warwick Smith made a mistake when he jammed an attempted clearance against a back stone and this eventually gave Lindholm a position to score two and move into the lead for the first time.
McMillan could only respond with a single in the eighth end and, in the ninth, he completely mis-judged his first draw and caught a front guard rather than drift just past it into a strong position.
This mistake effectively killed off the game. All of a sudden, Lindholm found himself in a strong enough position to score three from the end.
He then ran the British quartet out of stones in the 10th for his win with a final 7-2 score. Afterwards, McMillan said: "Tomorrow morning we'll wake up and get on with the job. There's going to be a dog-fight yet. We know that six wins can get us in (to the semis), so we're still in with a shout".
With two games played, the British men have yet to put a point onto the ranking scoreboard.
While they have just seven games left in their round-robin programme, they have now faced what are arguably the top two teams in the event.
But this leaves them virtually no margin for error from here on. Their next opponents are Norway and Germany.
Sweden 7-2 Britain
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