Muirhead's on the march

Great Britain's women's curling team registered their third win of the Sochi 2014 Winter Olympics on Friday with a comprehensive 12-3 defeat of Japan.

Both rinks went into the contest at the Ice Cube Curling Center with records showing two victories from four round-robin fixtures, but the Japanese looked considerably inferior to Eve Muirhead's all-Scottish world champions as the action unfolded.

Starting with the hammer, GB went 2-0 up in the first end and 4-2 up in the third, before a five-point steal in the seventh prompted their opponents to concede the match.

With that effort in the seventh, Team Muirhead once again got their names in the record books, equalling the highest number of points stolen in a single end of an Olympic fixture since curling, in its current format, was introduced to the Games programme in 1998 - matching a feat that Canada's men are the only other team to have achieved.

Earlier this week, Muirhead's rink set a new Olympic record by notching a seven in the fourth against the US (another 12-3 victory), the most points scored by either a men's or women's team in a single end.

However, vice-skip Anna Sloan, happy to see GB move into joint-third in the table - the top four progress to the semi-finals - played down the importance of records as they turn their attention to South Korea and Switzerland on Saturday.

She told Press Association Sport: "It (a record) builds momentum for the coming games and it's a good building block but unfortunately you don't get any prizes for getting them.

"But it's always good and it shows we are performing well and going in the right direction towards the end of the round-robin.

"It was great to beat the Japanese. It was a solid team performance and we supported each other really well.

"The Japanese are an experienced team and they have had a good season this year, so to come out and play well from the start was really good."

Sloan admits the point-scoring threat within the team only adds to their growing confidence.

"We try to do our jobs as good as we can to make Eve's as easy as possible," she said.

"Fortunately we played well out there today and she came out and didn't miss a thing. It's good for confidence.

"We feel we are going in the right direction, we had two tough games and two losses (against Canada and Sweden), but we took the feedback from our de-briefs and we're starting to build with the good performances.

"It's good to have back-to-back wins and we have to keep going."