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Turkish test.

the photo shows our fans who came all the way from Prague to experience the event.

rn

Turkish curling has gone up considerably in the last eight years or so, and despite the fact that neither Turkish men nor women participate in many international tournaments, the very existence of a dedicated hall in Erzurum probably adds to their quality. At the last European Championships, the women advanced to Group A of the European Championships for the first time and the men put in a solid performance even though they remained in B. The Turkish women defeated the favoured Russians in their first match. But we are no butterflies either. We had respect for the game, but we were not afraid. We gained an advantage with better LSD, but it was only a one in the first end. The second end was quite nutritious. For a while it looked like we could go for two, or at least one, but then there were such unfortunate angles that it could have gone to the opponent's four. Turkey's two was a solid compromise in the end. In the next end we finally created pressure from which we put a three and then it went down to ones for a while. In the sixth, the Turks put in two and in the eighth, after a shootout in the seventh end, they put in two again. We were drowning a little bit. In the ninth we tried a heavy draw deuce, but missed it by a bit, if we could at all. The tenth with no advantage had its conclusion in first a failed Czech attempt to tap back the best Turkish stone on the tee line, then a slightly inaccurate guard skip by Yildiz. Then, with a cool head, he played an excellent shift of his opponent's stone a few decimetres to the Czech number one. Yildiz couldn't get the Czech stone out and it went to the extra end. The infarct course was continued by a missed guard, failed chips and then a brilliantly thrown draw by Terka, brilliantly swept by Klara and Bětka. Then to the end guards and clearings. The last Czech guard slightly overplayed and the Turks had a chance to use a sensitive stone to push our scoring to a worse position, but after a touch the Turkish one got a lot further and we got our second win. Yuck, but it was a heck of a shift. The girls pulled it off and that makes it all the more valuable.