TObias Reichmann has packed a dartboard and there are enough board games, he said, when the charter machine with the national handball team takes off from Düsseldorf to Cairo this Tuesday morning. All in all, the expected luggage, after all, some time will have to be killed in the hotel, from which the pyramids will be very close, but also far away. The players cannot even use the pool terrace on the ground floor, where the German players reside in the “Mena House Cairo”.
But it is almost a little surprising how much anticipation there is for the World Cup adventure in Egypt – life in the “bubble” or not. “This World Cup,” said Axel Kromer, the sports director of the German Handball Federation, “is a huge thing for a lot of us in our squad.” At the same time, he was downright relieved that he had the prospect of finally talking about sport and No longer about hygiene concepts or the audience question that has been resolved since Sunday evening: The world association and the organizers still heard the requests of the players who were uncomfortable with the thought of playing in front of an audience in the darkest phase of the corona pandemic to date. The art of repression, but it will also need it in the almost three weeks that the stay will last.
Ventured out on the defensive
The association has not issued an official World Cup goal, the goal is the knockout round, i.e. the quarter-finals, said Kromer. Some of them have even dared to venture out of the defensive into which the Germans had fallen due to personnel reasons. Right winger Reichmann, for example, who did not want to forget his own team when listing his favorites. “If we start well, I think it can go very far,” he said. Or Andreas Wolff, the goalkeeper, about whom there was so much fuss recently because he had disrespected those who stayed at home, including his former teammates Patrick Wiencek, Hendrik Pekeler and Steffen Weinhold. “If we play in defense like we did in the first half,” he said after the 34:20 against Austria on Sunday, “I think we can achieve a fantastic result.”
There are still plenty of conditional statements in the statements, everything else would be bold after a total of nine cancellations, including those of the world’s best inner block. At the same time, you have the feeling that something could happen with this team. Alfred Gislason, the national coach, generally prefers to act cautiously rather than cocky, two weeks ago he warned of the mysterious force of Cape Verde, the second World Cup opponent. But he is pleased with the progress that his team has made in a short time. “I’m much more optimistic now than I was a week ago,” he says.
Some now seem to be hoping for a second Icelandic handball miracle for the DHB. However, that seems a lot less likely than the first in the EM triumph in 2016 under Dagur Sigurdsson. If the opponents come from Croatia instead of Cape Verde, not only will the new inner block with Johannes Golla and Sebastian Firnhaber have to stretch completely differently. But the effect that the association had hoped for from Gislason’s signing in February 2020 has materialized – albeit differently than expected.
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