Winning Streak Continues: Key Victory against Montenegro at the European Handball Championship

The Hungarian women’s handball team defeated Montenegro 26-20 to take a crucial two points in their first game of the main round at the European Handball Championship, partly hosted by Hungarian city Debrecen, on Thursday evening.

The national team won all three group matches to take two points into the main round, where they will next face Poland on Friday, Romania on Sunday, and world champions France on Tuesday. The top two finishers in the six-team group will advance to the semi-finals, while the third-placed teams will play for fifth place in Vienna.

The two teams have met ten times before, with Hungary recording five wins and five defeats. The co-hosts have been hungry for rematch, having last lost 24-18 to Montenegro in last year’s World Championship group stage.

Both teams qualified from the group stage with 100 percent performances. The last time the Hungarian national team started a continental tournament with three successive victories was in 2006.

With both sides taking the maximum two points into the semi-finals, the winner of this crucial match took a big step towards the final weekend in Vienna.

Hungarian national team player Csenge Kuczora said that something “snapped” in the Hungarian handball team at 6-2 down and that is why they were able to win. She added that they tried to push the limits of how far they could go and how far the opponent would go defensively. They knew it was going to be a very tough match, but they had no idea how much the referees would allow the Montenegrins to play hard.

Then something snapped in us. Zsófi Szemerey made the saves, our defense was absolutely fine, hence we could help each other and from then on we dominated the game,”

said Kuczora, who scored four goals.

According to head coach Vladimir Golovin, it took 60 minutes of hard work for the Hungarian women’s handball team to beat Montenegro 26-20. “The game they play, we should not play: they put us to sleep and finished their slow flowing attacks with a change of rhythm. We talked about it beforehand, but it did not work for a while, we could not pick up our own rhythm defensively,” he began his assessment in response to a question from MTI. The coach referred to the fact that the rivals had taken a four-goal lead at the start of the match, from where his team had to turn things around.

He recalled that from around the 12th minute onwards, his team’s defense became more mobile, they closed down the areas better, their players made more tackles, which allowed them to accelerate their attack and thus wear down their opponents. “The tempo that we dictated was just not right for them, and that is why they made so many mistakes in the endgame (…),” he said.

He stressed that

the Hungarian team had to work hard for 60 minutes to end the game with that result, which took a lot out of his players.

The Hungarians won for the fourth time in their fourth European Championship match, but they have almost no time to rest as they will play Poland at the Phoenix Arena in Debrecen at 8:30 p.m. on Friday.

Via MTI, Featured image: MTI/Czeglédi Zsolt