They needed a defeat to secure their place in the Champions League and they got it. With a difference of eleven goals, MT Melsungen lost badly against Berlin on Thursday. The coach had a real outburst of anger.
Nebojsa Simic had already been lit before the attack. The MT Melsungen goalkeeper had to take a breath and did so with an appeal on Instagram: “I would like to ask the entire handball public to refrain from making unnecessary and disrespectful comments and to stop badmouthing our title win (…) Nobody ever goes into a game expecting to lose.”
With this, Simic addressed the special constellation that MT Melsungen needed a defeat on Thursday, to secure Champions League qualification. Because if their opponent, Füchse Berlin, had slipped out of the top two places and won the Champions League for their part, then the Melsungers would have lost a starting place as European League winners. A bizarre situation that naturally gave rise to predictions of a possible distortion of competition – even if the club couldn’t do anything about it. In fact, Melsungen clearly lost 28:39 on Thursday. The question arose when simply looking at the result: Did the actors let themselves down after all?
Game takes place two days after the party
But: You can’t say that, especially with a view to the first half. The MT held the reigning German champions to 16:18. “We did really well in the first half. The circle game worked really well,” said outside player Dimitri Ignatow at Dyn. The Melsungers actually didn’t lack the necessary will, but they did lack the strength. Two days earlier, after the official reception, the players had made themselves comfortable on the town hall steps with a few beers and celebrated for a long time.
It was only logical that the last percentage points were missing against a Berlin that was highly motivated to reach the Champions League, where the overplayer Mathias Gidsel was chasing his 300th goal and Lasse Andersson, for example, was aiming for a worthy farewell. Melsungen, on the other hand, had to do without Simic, captain Timo Kastening, playmaker Erik Balenciaga and David Mandic. The 41-year-old assistant coach Isaias Guardiola was on the table again. So it would have been difficult for MT even without the topic of the Champions League. “We gave it our all last year and beat the Füchse by eight or nine goals,” said Timo Kastening.
Coach cooks: “The will f*** you”
“The Berliners got into their tempo game and we couldn’t stop it because of their strength,” Ignatow also admitted. Especially at seven against six, the MT received a few throws into the empty goal. The air ran out in the final phase. However, one person definitely wanted to get something else – namely coach Roberto Garcia Parrondo. The coach was so angry about the referee’s decisions that he shouted during his timeout: “They won’t give you a foul. They will f*** you till the end” (loosely translated: “They won’t call a foul on you, but will make your life difficult until the end”).
The spectators were more forgiving, celebrating their team with standing ovations and chants in the final minutes of the game. The team and staff subsequently signed their names in the Golden Book of the City of Kassel in the hall. Ignatow hasn’t been able to accept any congratulations for reaching the Champions League because, purely theoretically, it’s not finalized yet. “We can’t realize all of this yet,” said the right-winger, speaking from the hearts of thousands in the hall.
