Wide-open group C highlights Sunday’s action
The Men's EHF EURO 2024 round 2 continues on Sunday with games in group A in Berlin, group B in Mannheim and group C in Munich. The situation in group A is pretty simple: France and Germany could book their main round tickets on Sunday, if they beat Switzerland and North Macedonia respectively.
It’s an important one, as important as the one against North Macedonia from two days ago. We have to show a better face than we did in the first game, but Switzerland are in the same position. They remain dangerous, and they know that this is their last chance to qualify.
Germany are as good a team as France. Maybe not individually, but collectively, they proved to be really strong. They had an amazing defence, an amazing goalkeeper and we know it’s going to be really hard to beat them. To win, we will have to play our best handball, not only for 40 minutes like we did against France, but for 60 minutes.
They are a very good team but we have to prepare that game as seriously as we did the first one. We know that a win would send us to the main round, but we want to win every game.
We have a Spanish coach, he knows the style of our opponents well, yet their players have more experience than us. Of course, they won European championships, they won the [EHF] Champions League, they are very experienced.
There is a saying Spain is like a diesel engine, like we need some time to get our things going. We will see. The first game is always hard, especially when you lose an important match. We need to win in the last two matches here in Mannheim and qualify for the main round.
Austria is a great quality team. I know a lot of their players. Their play is based mostly on the left side with Sebastian Frimmel, Mykola Bylik and Lukas Hutacek, they have a good line player, Tobias Wagner, and we will try to close that side for them. Their disadvantage is they don’t have a wide roster and we will try to impose our rhythm.
Croatia showed they have some of the best players in the world. We will have a lot of problems with the Croatian 6-0 defence, we saw that even Spain could not find a solution for it. Our backcourt players need to have a great game and score easily from the nine-metre line and try to open some thing for our line player.
We have a lot of players who are good in one-on-one and they will try to make it tight. So, we need to spread them apart and make some space for our one-on-one players. It will be a similar game, but we want to get the tempo up, maybe their team will try to slow down, we will see.
We need to forget that match against Hungary fast, because we have a match tomorrow against Iceland. Iceland play very fast. We need to stop them in transition, and that’s it.
Everyone is full of motivation and we’ll play this game like a final because Hungary need these two points to go through and we need to go because of the draw of yesterday. We need also two points, so for us it’s to stay alive in this tournament.
They have a really good team. We know a lot of players in the Serbian team and they know us as well. They have a really good defence with good goalkeepers. And we have to try to be faster in the fast break and score easy goals.
