VThe German handball players have not yet had to show much at the World Cup. They would probably have won the opening game against Uruguay if they had climbed straight out of the plane seat onto the floor, the game against Cape Verde was canceled, which national coach Alfred Gislason expressly regretted at the video conference on Monday: “I’m a bit disappointed that we didn’t get the game, ”he said; in the meantime Cape Verde even withdrew completely from the tournament after several corona cases.
What we had seen before at the easy 43:14 against Uruguay was a glimpse into the future of German handball. And that looked promising, even if it came along a bit impetuous at that moment. It was a matter of seconds in which Juri Knorr packed just about everything when he finally got playing time. Substitution, explosive determination at the circle gate.
Withdrawal, over-motivated defense – seven meters, time penalty. That was, compressed in the competition situation, that Juri Knorr, about whom his teammate Paul Drux said on Monday that he brought the team “the youthful lightness”. And in the long run, possibly even more, as goalkeeper Andreas Wolff thinks: “He shows approaches to perhaps be this piece of the puzzle that we have been missing in the last few years.”
Knorr, 20 years old and the son of the former national player Thomas Knorr, is considered the coming man for the middle position – the playmaker role on which German handball has been looking for the key for years. And where in the past few years no one really had luck. Philipp Weber can tell a lot about this. At the present time, Weber is “clearly the number one middleman” for Gislason, and it will depend on him more and more in Egypt.
On this Tuesday, Hungary is the opponent in Giza (8.30 p.m. in the FAZ live ticker for the Handball World Cup and on ZDF), according to the paper it is the last preliminary round game, but because the points are taken, the Germans see it as the first of the main round . They finally want to leave the corona issue behind. “I think that the team and I take a relatively relaxed approach,” said Drux. You probably have to try to block it out. In return, the team is apparently already beginning to sense unexpected opportunities in terms of sport. Perhaps it is a tournament where “anything is possible”, said Gislason in view of the problems facing favorites Spain (draw against Brazil, wafer-thin win against Poland) or Croatia (draw against Japan).
The opponents from Uruguay brace themselves in vain against Philipp Weber’s throwing attempt.
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Image: Reuters
But this also means that your own team has to grow – the Hungarians are the first real yardstick in Gislason’s tenure. Above all, he had defense trained in order to find the right processes and distances against the massive backcourt players. But the attack will also have to find new ways and gaps against the “significantly larger inner block” compared to the two Austrian games in January. So far, says Gislason, Weber has done it as a handlebar “very well”, as he is “very satisfied” with the game controls, which, in addition to Weber and Knorr, are still with the young Marian Michalczik (23).
Weber, for whom it is the first World Cup at the age of 28, says of himself that he is “several steps further” than in his first tournament, that failed EM 2018 under Gislason’s predecessor Christian Prokop. The two knew each other very well from the club, the SC DHfK Leipzig. But just as the EM 2018 went in the pants for the then new national coach, so did Weber. It was a single disappointment that made him doubt himself, and it took a long detour, including psychological work, to fix it. The home World Cup 2019 went to Prokop with Martin Strobel.
He had won the European Championship title with the Germans in 2016, but now he only played in the second division. That said something about the needs in this position in handball country Germany, but Prokop’s improvisation seemed to work – until Strobel was seriously injured in the main round; As a result, he even renounced the EM 2019 on his own initiative. When other candidates were canceled for this tournament, above all the unpredictable Fabian Wiede, Prokop tried Drux, but the Germans didn’t really get started with him. It only got better when Weber came out of cover.
Gislason calls Weber a “classic middle man”, but in Leipzig he only took over this role in full this season. The national coach is happy about it, which makes it easier for him to hire an already young and inexperienced team for Weber. Is it enough for the highest ambitions? Gislason did not want to answer the question of how the Germans are positioned in the middle position in an international comparison on Monday. He has already said one thing or another about Knorr, who, unlike Weber, is also involved in defense. That he is “already very advanced for his age”, for example.
In fact, the native of Flensburg has already experienced a lot: an instructive detour via FC Barcelona, for example, before arriving at GWD Minden in the Bundesliga; but also recently a corona infection, which hit him comparatively hard. That was a “difficult subject”, he said, but: “Everyone has decided to take the risk.” From the coming season onwards, Knorr will play for a top club, the Rhein-Neckar Löwen – and then possibly also an even bigger role in the national team. “We’ll have a lot of fun with it in the future,” says Gislason.
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