Canada, Switzerland set to clash for curling glory at World Women's Curling Championship

It all comes down to this as the top two teams on the planet will go head-to-head for curling glory on Sunday evening in Sydney, N.S.

Ottawa's Team Rachel Homan will look to capture Canada's first gold-medal at the World Women's Curling Championship since 2018 when they take on Switzerland's Team Silvana Tirinzoni, the four-time defending champions, in the championship game. 

You can watch all the action LIVE from Sydney's Centre 200 at 4pm ET/1pm ET on TSN3 and streaming on TSN.ca or the TSN App.

Team Homan - also featuring third Tracy Fleury, second Emma Miskew, lead Sarah Wilkes, alternate Rachelle Brown and coach Don Bartlett - punched their ticket to Sunday's final with a 9-7 victory over Korea's Team Eunji Gim in Saturday's semifinal. The Swiss advanced with a 6-3 win over Italy's Team Stefania Constantini in the other semi. 

"We've trained and we've prepared for this moment," Homan told the media. "We know that we're ready. We're going to give everything we can."

Canada's only loss this week came against the Koreans in the round-robin finale. They defeated Team Tirinzoni on Tuesday, snapping their 42-game win streak at the women's worlds in the process. 

Thanks to their first-place finish, Team Homan will have the hammer in the opening end of the gold-medal final. 

The 34-year-old Homan, who owns a world title from 2017, leads all last rock throwers in shooting percentage at 88.6 per cent, just slightly better than Team Tirinzoni's fourth Alina Paetz, who sits at 88.4 per cent. 

As a team, Switzerland is shooting a tournament-best 89.2 per cent, ahead of Canada who are second at 88.4 per cent. 

On Sunday, Homan and Miskew were named All-Star in their respective positions while Swiss lead Carole Howald and Sweden third Sara McManus were also named to the team. 

Homan's crew is ranked first in the world while Tirinzoni and company are ranked second. 

On the season, Team Homan is having one of the most dominant runs in recent history. They own a 61-6 record and have gotten the better of Tirinzoni in all four of their head-to-head matchups. 

But, to be the champ, you have to beat the champ when it matter the most. And nobody has been able to do that over the last four women's worlds. 

Tirinzoni, 44, and Paetz, 34, are the only curlers to have won four consecutive women’s world championships, playing with different combinations of front-end players along the way, including Carole Howald and Briar Schwaller-Hürlimann last year. This season, 25-year-old Selina Witschonke has replaced Schwaller-Hürlimann in the lineup.

It’s not just Tirinzoni’s rinks that have been dominant, but Switzerland as a whole. Four different skips – Mirjam Ott (2012), Binia Feltscher-Beeli (2014, 2016), Pätz (2015) and Tirinzoni (2019, 2021, 2022, 2023) – have led the European nation to eight gold-medal performances in the past 11 World Women’s Curling Championships.

The last time Canada won and played in a women's worlds final was in 2018 when Jennifer Jones and her Winnipeg-based captured gold in North Bay.