An unpleasant outcome in the current qualifying tournaments will complicate the path of the Latvian men’s handball team to get closer to the level reached a couple of years ago, however, in the general view of the future of this sport, there is no shortage of rays of hope. The President of the Latvian Handball Federation (LHF) Aleksandrs Babra considers the failure to qualify for the 2026 European Championship (EC) main qualification round “very sad about the stumble in Luxembourg”. “However, the initial goals for this team model were already set for the long term. We need to work further, because the potential for the team is good.”
After the debut in 2020 European Championship and the opportunity robbed by the pandemic to compete for participation in the World Championship (WC) held a year later, the national team experienced an extremely rapid generational change. In the transitional stage, almost all handball players who graduated from the school of the ASK team, which broke up more than ten years ago, have finished their careers, but promising young players in Latvia lack such a level of professional work on a daily basis. “If we remove the goalkeeper Edgars Kukša, the adult national team is basically a youth team for us,” one of the coaches of the national team, Arnolds Straume, reminds us of the average age of the team, which has been hovering around twenty years in recent years.
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