Erwin Feuchtmann is also a little hero of handball in Germany. Although he plays for the Chilean national team with his brothers Emil and Harald; But because he has a German grandfather and was already active in the Bundesliga, he was celebrated with loud “Erwin, Erwin” shouts at the 2019 World Cup in the Cologne Arena. Erwin Feuchtmann, 30, is currently playing for the Spanish first division club Ademar León, and on Sunday was in the middle of an apparently absurd test arrangement that the whole handball community is now talking about.
Feuchtmann was on the record when the professionals from Ademar León and Balonmano Sinfín were only allowed to do their job with mouth and nose protection. Shortly before the game, the authorities of the Castilla y León region had decreed that contact sports in closed rooms could only be practiced with mask protection due to the corona pandemic. So also with handball. The number of infections in Spain is high, and the trend is rising, which is why the new measure, although the top division players take weekly corona tests anyway.
That led to irritating images. The masks slipped wildly on the players’ faces during the game; one wore it under his nose, the other on his chin. The piece of fabric that was soaked from breathing slipped completely off the face of another player after a courageous grip by the defender and had to be fastened back behind the ears after the attack.
“People who decide something like this are just idiots”
The criticism that Feuchtmann gave to the station was correspondingly hearty Sport1 expressed opposite. Many players would have had severe breathing problems under the mask. “They got sick because they were about to collapse. It makes sense if you breathe your own carbon dioxide all the time,” said Feuchtmann. The worst was in the second half, “most of them had the mask almost down there”. It was not entirely clear what the authorities’ stipulation would do.
In the end, the players got very close physically and crashed their upper bodies into each other – this time with slipped, soaked and also sticky mouth and nose protection, because the professionals had great problems with their hands covered with resin, the piece of fabric from their fingers again to get. For Sinfín’s coach Victor Montesinos, the whole scene was “surreal, as the players had full body contact for 60 minutes and the mask could hardly prevent infection”. The experimental set-up was also interesting for the referees, who could choose between two options: Either they put their whistle under the mask before each whistle. Or they kept the pipe in their mouths halfway through.
Feuchtmann attacked the official order sharply. “That was one of the stupidest decisions in politics,” the backcourt player exclaimed: “People who decide something that ignores reality are just idiots.” The fact that only the game in León was affected and that league leaders FC Barcelona were allowed to play against Valladolid a few hours earlier without protective measures caused further incomprehension. But support immediately came from Barcelona: The Dane Caspar Ulrich Mortensen commented on a video of the game on Twitter with three smileys, each of which clapped their hands in front of their foreheads.
Feuchtmann and his team are threatening a boycott
A similar scenario is hardly conceivable in Germany, as Frank Bohmann, the managing director of the Handball Bundesliga (HBL), has already ruled out. It would be better to stop the game than to send the players to the plate with mask protection. Holger Glandorf, who coordinates the corona measures at SG Flensburg-Handewitt, was also appalled. He could “not even imagine getting air under it,” Glandorf told the Ed.
An assumption that Erwin Feuchtmann can confirm. He has already ruled out that Ademar León’s team will wear mouth and nose protection a second time. “We will not accept that,” said Feuchtmann, the authorities now have almost a week to discuss the much-criticized measure. Because Ademar León’s upcoming home league game will have to be postponed: Several players tested positive against Morrazo Cangas.
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