AS Eve Muirhead made her expected flying start to the Scottish Champions in Perth last night her rivals began jockeying for position in their bid to de-throne the queen of Scottish curling.
She and her team of Sarah Reid, Vicki Adams and Anna Sloan could hardly have been in more imposing form as they swept Hazel Smith's team aside, rounding off a 12-1 victory with a rare count of seven in the final end played as their opponents accepted their fate with four of the scheduled 10 ends still to play.
On the adjacent rink Lauren Gray, the fifth member of Muirhead's Olympic bronze medal rink at Sochi last year, was meanwhile doing battle with her former skip in a much tighter encounter which was decided on the final end and after Hannah Fleming claimed a double at the final end to edge her way to a 7-6 win she set her sights on the former world champion whom she meets for the first time in the round-robin stages today.
"Eve's the one with the target on her back not us, so we can just keep quiet in the background and keep working our way hopefully to the weekend," said Fleming.
"We're used to Eve being the favourite and us being the underdogs so there's no reason why we can't beat here. We've been close before and we have beaten her in the past.
"It's anyone's game (in the play-offs) whoever plays best on the day so we know we can play well and we have to hope that our day's a good one when it comes to it.
"We've not been spectacular this season and we've not been terrible, we've just been really looking forward to this week. Everything's gone well in our preparations so we'll do the best we can. It doesn't really matter what's happened up until now, it's all about this week."
In the other match on the ice yesterday Gina Aitken's link got the better of Katie Murray's 8-5, while the men's event gets underway tomorrow with Ewan MacDonald's defending champions up against Ross McLeary's rink.
"It's a little bit different this year, with a couple of extra teams in it that weren't there last year, but not a huge amount and if we can come up with a similar standard as we did last year we should be in the mix hopefully," MacDonald acknowledged.
"Our goal is to be in the play-offs at the end of the week and then it's a different game. I think the guys are all in good form and we're looking forward to getting going.
"The ice is great here, there's good curl so you can play an aggressive game and it suits better teams so we'll hopefully have a good week.
"There's a lot of good teams. I don't think it's a given that any of the guys you'd expect to be winning games will win them. There's a lot of teams are coming through and showing a bit of potential, some of the younger guys as well and they're keen to keep pushing forward."
In terms of those additional teams he was referring, of course, to David Murdoch's Olympic silver medallists who were controversially denied a chance to take part in this event last year when it was run at the same time as the Olympics.
They face David Mundell's team while the new team being skipped by Tom Brewster, the fifth member of the Olympic team, which includes Muirhead's brothers Glen and Thomas take on Bruce Mouat's newly-crowned Scottish junior champions.
Having upset the full-timers in the Euro play-downs earlier in the season Dave Edwards and his team are aiming to do so again and open up against Cameron Bryce, while Kyle Smith's former junior world champions start their campaign against Stuart Taylor.
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