West Lothian gents made a bold bid to finish the indoor season in a blaze of Scottish Cup glory but the stars from the Inveralmond Stadium in Livingston were eclipsed by a 6-4 points defeat dished out by Blantyre in a hard fought final played at Abbeyview, Dunfermline.
Read MoreThe win honours between the four rinks were evenly distributed but the scales of match victory were tipped against the six times champions with Blantyre’s narrow 83-79 supremacy on shot aggregate.
Wins for the rinks skipped by Calum Logan and Neil Speirs were much applauded by the WL support as they were achieved at the expense of Blantyre icon figures Iain McLean and Stewart Anderson. Logan conjuring up a magic finishing run of 1, 1, 1, 6 to skip Darren Pearce, Raymond Logan, and Mark Allison to an exhilarating 24-16 win over McLean that raised the growing aggregate tensions as the match reached its final climax.
Speirs also produced a furious fighting finish with a run of 3, 2, 2, (1), to skip Bryan Cooper, Ian Drysdale ( C) , and Thomas Mann to a 25-20 win over Anderson. Blantyre, who had defeated WL in the 2012 final, were inspired to title victory by the damage inflicted by Jim Meikle, and Brian Irvine on the WL rinks skipped by Craig Moss, and James Speirs.
Moss and his front-three of George Sneddon, Barry Sword, and Jamie Aitken faced an uphill battle at 16-8 down after 12-ends and the uplift of a mighty count of 5 on end 16 wasn’t inspirational enough to avoid a 25-17 defeat. Speirs (James) and his rink of Richard Mark, Dougie Mitchell, and Gary Orr were in the toils at 17-7 down after 14 ends and went on to suffer a 22-13 defeat. Meanwhile the match aggregate points looked well out of sight when trailing 75-57 with three ends to go but WL did reduce it to 83-79 with a commendable fighting finish of 4-3; 8-0; 3-3; 7-2.