Jones vs Cameron in STOH semifinal

[With files from Curling Canada]

Ontario skip Rachel Homan defeated Manitoba veteran Jennifer Jones on Saturday night in Calgary, stealing two in a dramatic extra end to escape with a 6-4 win in the Page 1/2 qualifying game.

Homan, Tracy Fleury, Emma Miskew and Sarah Wilkes now advance to the 2024 Scotties Tournament of Hearts gold medal final on Sunday.

“Unbelievable game,” said Homan. “They played unbelievable, had us in a pile of trouble every end but we stuck with it.”

The Ottawa crew has run through the Scotties unbeaten at 10-0, with the skip making runbacks like this one, which was thrown against Team Canada.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwPYosG_OyU[/embed]

However, Homan and Co. needed every shot in their arsenal to subdue their stubborn Manitoba opponents at the WinSport Event Centre.

The match see-sawed back and forth, and in the extra end Jones faced a difficult raise takeout to the button to win. She couldn’t stick it, and gave up the stolen deuce.

Team Jones—now at 7-3—has been strong all week and may have deserved a better fate Saturday. A couple of raise takeouts were well thrown but miraculously went through the goalposts of enemy stones in the house.

“Just felt like a great game, back and forth, fun to play,” said Jones. “We let a couple of opportunities slip through our grasp.”

Jones is looking to win her seventh national women’s curling championship, more than any other curler in the country. Jones, who lives in Ontario but is skipping the Manitobans, entered the 2024 Scotties tied with former teammate Jill Officer and Nova Scotia skip Colleen Jones with six Scotties titles.

Homan, a three-time Canadian champion and 2017 world winner, needed to do something to get her back on top of the curling world, so she recruited Fleury—a Sudbury, Ont., product—to hold the broom but throw third so she could concentrate on last rock.

No one was quite sure how the new union would work.

Last year they were knocked out in the championship round at the Scotties. This year, with Homan back skipping, it’s been gangbusters. The team has lost only five games all season.

The Ontarians now await the winner of Sunday’s semifinal at 12 noon (Mountain time) between Jones and rival Manitoban Kate Cameron (now 7-3), who ended the run of Alberta’s Selena Sturmay 6-4 in the page 3 vs 4 match earlier in the day.

Cameron had eliminated the four-time defending champions skipped by Kerri Einarson on Friday night.

The gold medal final goes at 6:00 p.m. MT.