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I was watching this game live in Ornskoldsvik, on December, 13th at arena A. If a man will say that this game was amazing, it will mean nothing. David Murdoch just made a miracle in the 10th end with his double take-out and brought extra-end and opportunity to win to his team. Then he used this opportunity and won. By a chance or not, we don’t know (Tomas Ulsrud’s last stone was over swept) Scotland became European Champions. 

I decided to analyze this game and to try to answer the following questions:

1. Why Scotland won, but not Norway? In round-robin game Norway beat Scotland with scores 6-5, but everything was decided in the last end, as in the final game. Unfortunately, record of the game did not contain 11th end, looks like no one expected teams to play that long and my analysis based on first 10 ends only, but even this set of data allowed me to get some trends.
2. What went wrong for Norway and why it was not be able to get and advantage?
   

So I passed through the whole game several times, made a lot of notes, then using all my mathematical skills, I made this analysis. Each shot was ranked by me in the following way:

• 0 – no mistakes, task completed successfully.
• 1 – mistake, task was not complete as skip wanted it and situation became worse.
• 0.5 – task was not complete, but it was uncertain, was it better or worse.
  

This ranking is different than common on TV – I was calculating percentage of successful shots, but not percentage of performance, also I was not giving additional scores for extra-class shots. So, according to my system perfect team would get 0 points and the most rubbish team would get 80 (10 ends per 8 shots).  And if you will take 80 minus points, you will get amount of successful shots, and if you will divide it on 80, you will receive percentage of successful shots.
And the following results appeared for players for the whole game :

Looks like everything is obvious – Scotland had better results, so they won. Yes, but following this logic Scotland had to be always over Norway having advantage in scores, but David Murdoch made miracle only in 10th end, and all previous ends teams never had equal scores. Look:

We show only first ten ends, since they are within our analysis, but for those who are curious in extra-end Scotland took 1 stone and European Champions title.

Let us look into ends and take look on amount of mistakes of both teams per ends. Here it is:

Vertical axis is mistake points, horizontal – ends. Blue line is for Norway, red is for Scotland, figures in circles are scores in each end. Dashed lines are linear trends, what is interesting they are parallel to each other and both decreasing that mean that in average, during game teams were decreasing amount of mistakes. I would call it trend of professionals.

Looking at this graph we can say the following:

 

• Norway got an advantage in first two ends since they had less mistakes;
• But even after first end looks like they ‘relaxed’ and amount of mistakes increased more than twice, at the same time Scotland significantly improved their performance;
• Scores in ends from 4th to 9th were taken by skips, I do not reduce importance of other players, but it were last stones;
• Interesting dependence in ends from 4th to 9th that team makes more mistakes but gets a point.
• Brake after the 5th end helped for Scotland team to concentrate and had opposite effect for Norway.
  

Okay, looks like the game was done by skips performance. Let’s take a look on their mistake points:

Look, how David Murdoch concentrated after failures in first two ends! No mistakes at all, but they did not start to get scores in each end, that proves that skip does not make the game – must be team. 

Let’s take a look at team’s results. On the next chart we compare all four players of both teams and look at their mistake points though the whole game:

Only Haavard Vad Petersson had better performance than Scotland. On the other positions Norway was less stable than Scotland.

Now let’s take a look at types of shots that teams were making during the game:

As you can see Scotland had mostly attacing game – draws and guards (more than 56%), when Norway played mostly on heavy shots – take-outs and hit-rolls trying to defend and clean stones(more than 57%). 

Were those tactics reasonable? Next chart shows percentage of mistakes of each team by types of shots:

Norway was better in guards, but they did not use them, they preferred hit-rolls and take-outs, but percent of successful shot was lower than Scotland had. They could compare only in draws, and Norway had 38% of draws versus 28% of Scotland team.

What conclusions can I make having all this information?

• Norway made more mistakes than Scotland;
• Norway was improving their performance, but after decrease in first four ends;
• Scotland was improving their performance but they started to do it after 2nd end.
  

These are explanations and answers on two questions that I put in the beginning of this article, which I was able to retrieve not getting deep into the game, in ends and certain shots, but just looking at overall picture.

Source: Anton Porotikov