Secure in the knowledge that her team will be playing in the knockout stages at the European Championships as they maintained their 100 per cent record through a sixth round of matches, Eve Muirhead last night turned her attention to how they position themselves for the play-offs.

The former world champion skip acknowledged, however, that some of their toughest matches in the round-robin section are yet to come on the basis of the records of the three teams they have yet to meet, so there is work to be done to ensure that they are ideally placed.

“Now the play-offs are looming you get ranked one to four, so it’s important that we get try to get ranked as high as we can,” said the woman whose teams have dominated the Scottish game for the past six years and repeatedly been contenders in major international championships during that period.

“We’ve still got three crucial games left so we don’t want to let anything slip, because anything can happen. If we manage to keep the winning streak going it keeps our heads high and keeps momentum.

“It’s important that we get as good wins as we can against teams we think are going to be in the play-offs and we’ve still got the Czechs in the morning who are a really tough team. We have Russia last and in the middle of those Denmark and all those teams are right in the mix, so we’ve done great so far but we can’t get complacent. We just have to keep playing well.”

Yesterday’s meeting with Daniela Jentsch’s German rink pretty much fitted into the same category, so there was considerable satisfaction to be drawn from the way they controlled that match throughout.

“It was good because we knew the Germans were playing well going into that game,” said Muirhead. “Glen (Howard, their coach) always checks the stats before the game so we knew it was going to be tough and we were going to have to play well.”

The way they have started has been all the more impressive because of the way their line-up has been shuffling this season and Muirhead paid tribute both to the way that Anna Sloan has quickly found her form after a lengthy injury lay-off which ended just a few weeks ago and that Lauren Gray has settled in since joining them and switching from skipping her own team to playing lead for former rivals.

“Anna’s playing great out there,” she said.

“It must be so hard for her having been out for the majority of the season and to come back more or less into the Europeans is a big ask. I know she’s trained really hard to get to where she is now. I’m really, really pleased for her.

“And you forget that Lauren is new to the team. She has been with us at the likes of World Championships and Olympic Games as an alternate but that’s not the same as being on ice and throwing stones. She has been fantastic.

“Lead’s one of the most important positions out there because if you don’t get set up in an end then you’re chasing for the rest of it. My dad has always told me that a lead is almost as important as a skip out there.”

Muirhead did offer some hope to rivals, however, in her explanation of one of a couple of missed opportunities that kept the Germans interested when she missed a relatively straightforward chance to draw for three shots at the sixth end.

“I had a draw for three and I missed, but God, I’m not a robot. I’m going to miss a few, but overall I’m pretty pleased,” she said with a laugh.

There must be times when opponents imagine otherwise such is her consistency.

The same most certainly cannot be said of Team Brewster, the Scottish men challenging at this event whose line-up includes her brother Glen.

Having beaten the three teams seen as their strongest rivals for medals, their defeat in their opening match was the only win Denmark had picked up and they repeated that in yesterday’s sixth match, losing to a Finnish team that had not won previously.

Since they had also lost to the unfancied Austrians that left them in a precarious position ahead of last night’s meeting with Germany who had produced one shock against Norway’s former world champions Team Ulsrud earlier in the day to claim only their second win of the competition and another in squeezing out the Scots 4-2 when they stole a shot at the final end.

“We lost two games we probably shouldn’t have today,” said skip Tom Brewster, before adding defiantly: “We’re still. Two wins tomorrow and we’re still there.”

They first face Italy, another of the four teams sharing fifth spot in the standings with three wins and four losses, then Russia who are currently ahead of them having won four.