Dhe handball jack-of-all-trades Bob Hanning was once vice president of the German Handball Association. Even back then he was reluctant to mince his words. Hanning called the women’s national team’s performances “a mess” when he announced before the home World Cup in December 2017: “This is the last chance for German women’s handball – if we only finish seventeenth again, we can close the deal.” Never before and never since has German women’s handball been spoken about in such a fatalistic way.
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