“Catastrophic bad”
National coach starts his players
08.05.2025 – 11:52 a.m.Reading time: 2 min.
In Germany’s handball players, the house blessing hangs wrong. The performance of the DHB stars at the happy draw in Switzerland brought national coach Alfreð Gíslason on the palm.
The start was hardly to be explained, the trouble of the national coach: At 32:32 in the European Championship qualifier in Switzerland, the German national handball team once again showed a weak initial phase-and brought Alfreð Gíslason to the palm.
“We play a catastrophic bad first half, I have to say honestly,” said the national coach after the game. He listed “nine misses and eight technical mistakes” and took a breath of breath over the new false start. After ten minutes, Germany was 1: 5 behind, at the break it was 8:13-very different than planned in the fight for group victory in the European Championship qualification.
Immediately after the final whistle, Gíslason confronted his team. “I think that one or the other was too loose,” he said. In the back room, hardly anything happened in the first half – “except for a free throw”. It was too easy to get stuck and played too slowly overall. The Icelander did not find an explanation for this: “I can’t explain that.”
Such weaknesses at the beginning of a game are not new. A similar picture was already shown at the World Cup. This time, too, the German team only slowly got on. Captain Johannes Golla spoke of an overall disappointing appearance: “Apart from the last ten minutes, I can’t get much good out of the game. It wasn’t okay of us how we played over long distances.”
After all, the final sprint was right: the DHB team scored eight goals in the last eight and a half minutes. Juri Knorr got the equalization in the final second. Germany is already set for the European Championship finals before the last group game against Turkey on Sunday.
The game in Stuttgart has no effect on the table – but Gislason wants to see a completely different appearance of his team. “We just have to play better against Turkey,” he said. “I expect us to get into our game differently. There are many things that we have to do much, much better.”