RRI Sport Club– Women’s handball
The new generation of Romanian handballers will face their first test.
Florin Orban, 23.10.2024, 13:45
At the end of next month, a new edition of the European Women’s Handball Championship is scheduled to start. Matches will take place in Austria, Hungary and Switzerland. The Romanian team was drawn in Group B, alongside Montenegro, Serbia and Czechia. Group matches will be played in Debrecen. Romania will make its debut on Friday, November 29, against Czechia. The match against Montenegro is scheduled for December 1, while the final game against Serbia will be played on December 3. 24 teams have qualified to the European Championship, divided into six groups. The first two teams from each group will advance to the main stage, where they will be divided into two groups of six teams each. The top two teams in the main groups will qualify for the semi-finals.
Romania’s national team aims to rank among the top 12 teams. Given that coach Florentin Pera will have at his disposal a young team, with an average age of 23, the relatively modest expectations of the Romanian Handball Federation are understandable. Valuable players such as Cristina Neagu, Crina Pintea and Eliza Buceschi have recently retired from the national team, and their absence could leave a gap in the mechanics of the first lineup. Young players are promising, but not enough to convince, for example, the top clubs in the National League. One of Romania’s great coaches, Gheorghe Tadici, a silver medalist with the women’s national team in 2005 at the World Cup in Russia, criticized the attitude of Romanian clubs in an interview to Prosport: “Foreign players play on the field, and our Romanian players are in the stands. Only about three Romanians managed to catch the first lineup. Is that normal?”, Tadici asks, adding: “We invest thousands of EUR in foreign players. In Norway, the maximum salaries are somewhere around 6,000 – 7,000 EUR [e.n. – per month]. We offer them from 10,000 EUR to 20,000 EUR and we still don’t win Champions League”. As a solution, the coach suggests the establishment of a minimum number of Romanian players who are permanently on the playing field.
Let’s further note that, ahead of the European Championships, this weekend the Carpați Trophy tournament will take place in Cluj. North Macedonia, Slovakia, Switzerland, Turkey and Brazil will play alongside Romania. On Friday, Romania faces North Macedonia, on Saturday it will take on Switzerland and then it will play Brazil on Sunday. (VP)
