Bitter memory of 2015
When some saw the DHB team rocked
By Till Erdenberger, Gdansk
01/25/2023, 5:13 p.m
The German national handball team will play their World Cup quarter-finals against France in the evening. It’s the first time in eight years – and the last time it ended bitterly and with a lot of anger. It shouldn’t have gotten that far in the first place.
Juri Knorr, the director of a new DHB generation who has been so convincing so far, says he is “before what is probably the biggest game of my career”: In the evening (8.30 p.m. / ARD and in the live ticker on ntv.de) the German national handball team will play her World Cup quarterfinals against record world champion France, against the reigning Olympic champion. “We have to tackle the game with passion. We will put our hearts into our hands and make up for what we may lack in experience against the French with a fight,” promised goalkeeper Andreas Wolff, who has been outstanding so far. A World Cup quarter-final is something special.
It’s been eight years since the German national handball team, world champions in 1978 and 2007, was last able to contest a quarter-final at a World Cup. And the memory is dark. “We didn’t play our best game,” said Silvio Heinevetter, visibly struggling for words, at the Sky microphone. And then the national goalkeeper at the time added: “But today we can’t win the game, everyone knows that.” The DHB team lost to host Qatar at 24:26 – and at least Heinevetter felt shaken.
“Everyone knows what I think”
“We’re still guests here, so you have to be careful what you say. But anyone who has seen the game and has any idea knows what I’m thinking.” The Macedonian team of referees had at least decided on a visibly different interpretation of the passive game. While the DHB team got the signal early on to finish their attacks faster, the hosts had all the time in the world to organize their attacking game.
The Austrians had had a similar experience before, at least they felt as unfairly treated as Heinevetter at 27:29 in the round of 16 against the hosts: “We were called as many offensive fouls in the second half as in the whole tournament before. Qatar seems to have well covered”, Austria’s captain Viktor Szilagyi, today managing director of THW Kiel, mocked. “Maybe that’s to be expected. It’s hard for me to accept.” Coach Patrekur Johanesson “didn’t want to comment on the referees” after his team’s defeat in the round of 16, but subtly did so with his prediction for the rest of the tournament: “I think Qatar will be world champions.” It didn’t go that far, Qatar lost to France in the final.
The German handball legend Stefan Kretzschmar classified the events of the end of January 2015 soberly: “Of course there were sometimes double standards, but there weren’t many blatant wrong decisions,” wrote the 218-time national player in a column for Sport1. “It was an adventure in the last ten minutes against Austria in the round of 16, and we Germans suffered a bit from that too. But it wasn’t so striking that after the game you thought: for God’s sake, we were really ratted out here.”
“Just not good enough”
“We took the result on ourselves because we just weren’t good enough in the first half,” said right winger Patrick Groetzki. Paul Drux, on the other hand, preferred to make “no comment” on the game that the Germans lost against a Qatari team, a bit against the referees and against a huge crowd of 14,500 people. “In front of such an audience you ideally get a little cushion,” said Drux in 2015 to the “Tagesspiegel”, “for us it was exactly the opposite: we always ran behind a deficit.” In the end it wasn’t enough. Valero Rivera, then and now Qatar’s coach, only shrugged his shoulders: “Home advantage is extremely important in handball, that’s well known. If this game had been played in Germany, the Germans would have won it.”
The World Cup was awarded to Qatar in January 2011, just a few weeks after the emirate had won the bid for the highly controversial 2022 World Cup that had just ended. Qatar, which had not previously played a major role in handball, bought a strong team for the tournament with a lot of money: just four players in the WM-20 squad. from 2013 were locals. None of them scored a goal during the tournament.
The way to the final was paved by the Montenegrins Zarko Markovic and Goran Stojanovic, world-class goalkeeper Danijel Saric, a Bosnian, the French Bertrand Roiné, the Spaniard Borja Vidal Fernández and the Cuban Rafael Capote. Because in handball, unlike in football, where you can only play senior international matches for a single country, you only need a three-year international break to change nations, Qatar was able to put together a powerful all-star team. Supposedly there was 100,000 euros for each World Cup game won – per player. In handball, where mid-six-figure annual salaries are reserved for the absolute top stars, that’s a huge amount of money.
A large part of the truth is, however, that Germany shouldn’t have been there in Qatar. In terms of sport, the qualification in the playoffs against Poland was missed in two games. But because the world association threw the Australians, who were rather insignificant for global handball, out of the World Cup, the DHB team was able to move up – after the award criteria for the successor had been quickly changed in favor of Germany. “Somehow a strange feeling to be qualified in such a way,” tweeted national player Patrick Groetzki at the time. The matter came to a bitter end for the DHB selection, which surprisingly became European champion a year later – and lost again to Qatar at the 2017 World Cup, this time in the round of 16 and in France.
The French felt cheated in 2007
The memory of the evening of Lusail is no longer fresh, from the current squad only the very young Paul Drux and Groetzki, meanwhile German record World Cup participant, were there. But the date is on the calendar: January 28, 2015, the last World Cup quarter-finals for a German men’s national handball team. The entry will be deleted in the evening. On neutral ground, no home field advantage.
The new DHB generation will have to play their best game to have a chance against France. Johannes Golla even spoke of the “perfect game” that it takes to finally win a knockout game again. They last beat France in a World Cup in 2007, in the semifinals. It was 32:31 in Dortmund’s Westfalenhalle after two extra hours – because the Swedish referees, highly controversial, did not recognize France’s equaliser. “The refereeing decisions are slipping away and unfortunately there’s nothing you can do,” said the French FA’s technical director Philippe Bana at the time.
On the eve of the game, the French spoke to the President of the World Handball Federation, Egyptian Hassan Moustafa. “We told him we didn’t want to experience what the Spaniards suffered against the Germans in the quarter-finals,” said Bana. “The message has clearly not arrived.”