Eve Muirhead is too experienced to hit the panic button after slipping to a second defeat at the Olympic Games.
The British women’s curling skip knows what it’s like to be in a tough spot and insists she knows how to escape in Beijing.
Indeed it was just a few weeks that Muirhead’s rink lost to curling minnows Turkey in the Olympic qualifier, only to rebound with a brilliant winning streak.
It pays not to stress too early in curling and while two defeats in their opening three matches, including Friday’s 9-7 loss to Korea, is not ideal, neither is it anywhere close to terminal.
However, it certainly doesn’t get any easier, with Tabitha Peterson’s unbeaten USA next up on Saturday in a match that isn’t ‘must win’ but wouldn’t leave much margin in the five games that followed if success wasn’t forthcoming.
“We’ve got to move on, we’ve only played three games and we’ve been in this position before,” said Muirhead, 31, who won the European title in Norway last year.
“We were in this position in the Olympic qualifier, we’d only won one game and lost two, so we know where we are, we know what we’ve got to do and of course we are going to come out firing.
“Out there there’s zero margin for error, any errors you make, you usually get crucified for them.
“We just didn’t get the rubs on our side and maybe we didn’t cotton on to the ice conditions early enough, that’s something we will learn from.
“I don’t think there’s any breathing space here, I think every team is such high quality - that’s why they are at the Olympic Games.
“We’ve had a very tough start but it’s nothing we’ve not done before and we know what we need to do and that’s to come out a little bit sharper from the start.”
Olympic curling is an attritional business, though the schedule has Muirhead’s rink playing one game a day until Thursday, with matches with Denmark, Canada, Japan, China and the Russian team still to come.
“One-game days are always a little bit easier to get up for and I think we can get lots of rest and preparation in,” she added.
“We’ll go back, analyse this game, learn from what we can do better and learn from what we did well and then just switch off a little bit.”
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