Association discusses EM withdrawal of German handball players
National coach Alfred Gislason has to accept more player failures
What: REUTERS
After the failure of nine players infected with Corona, the German handball players at the European Championships lost three other professionals in addition to one supervisor. The fact that everyone is playing in the same position exacerbates the problem. Now the withdrawal is being discussed.
VBefore the classic against Spain at the start of the main round of the European Championship, Germany’s handball players were once again decimated. There were four more corona cases in the team on Wednesday, the German Handball Association announced after the final training session in Bratislava.
As a result, national coach Alfred Gislason only has a skeleton team available in the duel with the defending champion at the start of the main round this Thursday (6 p.m., ARD and WELT live ticker) as against Poland. According to the association, the players Sebastian Heymann, Djibril M’Bengue and Christoph Steinert as well as a member of the functional team are affected.
Three players affected
In addition to the backcourt players Heymann, M’Bengue and Steinert, left winger Rune Dahmke was absent from Wednesday’s relaxed training session. The training took place on a voluntary basis, it said.
The substitutes Daniel Rebmann and Patrick Zieker, who arrived in Bratislava on Wednesday afternoon, were also there. In total, Gislason has already nominated seven players after there had already been nine positive corona cases in the DHB team in the past few days.
Johannes Bitter (171 caps), Paul Drux (109), Fabian Wiede (85), Rune Dahmke (37) and Sebastian Firnhaber (12) are among the players who were nominated on Tuesday and played against Poland.
Despite the decimation, the German team won the preliminary round final against Poland on Tuesday with 30:23 and thus took two points into the main round. In addition to Spain, the opponents there are Norway, third at the European Championships (Friday), second at the World Cup, Sweden (Sunday) and Russia (Tuesday).
After the recent bad news, the German Handball Federation no longer rules out withdrawing from the finals in Hungary and Slovakia. “We will have to evaluate this new situation together,” announced DHB CEO Mark Schober. The association is in close contact with the team, the umbrella organization EHF and the Handball Bundesliga.
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