While their fellow Olympic medallists, Team Muirhead, were cruising through the qualifying stages of the women’s event Dave Murdoch and his men made things more difficult for themselves in Perth this week, but when it reached the stage that mattered they were back where they felt they should be at the top of the rankings.

Admittedly, whereas Eve Muirhead, Anna Sloan, Vicki Adams and Lauren Gray stood alone, completing their six match programme unbeaten, the 7-2 record Murdoch, Greg Drummond, Scott Andrews and Michael Goodfellow assembled was matched by Kyle Smith and his team.

However they had beaten local boy Smith’s team on the Dewar’s Centre ice, as well as defending champions Team Brewster and the three time Olympian, who led the same quartet to the Olympic final in Sochi, deemed himself satisfied.

“It’s something we wanted to do once we had those early losses, was to get a run going and we’ve kept that going and beaten those who would be considered the big names,” he said.

“We’re in the business end of the week which is where we wanted to be and it’s got a good feel. We’re making a lot of shots and that’s all you can do. You have to forget about the defeats and move on.”

The nature of the losses, against Team Hardie, who are not not currently funded by the British Curling programme and youngsters Team Whyte, had the potential to feed self-doubt since it has been by no means a stellar season for Murdoch to date. However the best competitors know how to take the positives from every situation and the veteran skip demonstrated that majestically yesterday.

“It’s a funny one,” he observed.

“For a few years there we’ve done really well on tour but not won the Scottish, whereas if you look back over my career to my times I’ve probably done that in seasons won the Scottish Championships and then done well at the Worlds in seasons when I’ve not had a good tour.”

Another way of looking at it might be to suggest that the old sporting truism that form is temporary and class is permanent remains valid and it seemed that way as the competition moved from the round-robin to the knockout stages.

Smith’s rink have also shown their quality this season in becoming the first Scottish team to reach a Grand Slam final in Canada, while the third team to qualify for the play-offs by right, with a matching 7-2 record but having lost to both of the other two, shifting them into the third v fourth match in the play-offs and so certain to have to play an extra match if they are to retain their title, was Brewster’s defending champions.

They earned themselves an evening off by beating the Hardie’s boys in the last of their round-robin matches, turning the match around after making the same mistake they had against both Murdoch and Smith.

“The two games we lost were down to losing a big end and both of them we played really well in all the other ends,” Brewster noted.

“That game (against Hardie) it nearly cost us again, but in the second half we played really well again and that’s a good sign.”

They now meet the World Junior and World University Games champions in the play-offs after their skip Bruce Mouat held his nerve to deliver the take out with the final stone of the last end to beat Hardie in last night’s tie-break.

As Mouat noted they have turned their form around considerably since Tuesday when they suffered two heavy defeats.

“I’m pleased with how I’m playing now,” he said.

“After Tuesday it was really rough, especially my own game because I was probably the reason we were getting thumped, so to come out and fire the last two days has been really good and it’s been a bit of a confidence boost which is quite a big aspect of my curling, having confidence on the ice and just relaxing into it.”

With the top two in the women’s standings having been decided ahead of yesterday’s last round-robin matches, albeit they ended with a fierce battle as Team Muirhead secured top spot only when they stole two at the final end against Team Smith, Hannah Fleming and her team were confronting a similar challenge to that which faced Mouat at the midway stage in the round-robin, having come into the event expected to reach the final.

“We’ve definitely done it the hard way,” she admitted.

“Our last round robin game meant a lot to us. We had to win it to get into the tie-break and managed to do that and we’ve kept the momentum going into this game, so hopefully we can keep doing that tomorrow.

“Hopefully this can help us. We’ve certainly upped our game since we found ourselves in a do or die situation.”