How many absentees will it take to bring down the French handball team? Already deprived of seven players at the start of a competition that started a fortnight ago, the Blues came to the end on Friday evening of a team from Sweden which had been giving them nightmares for some time. Winners 31-26, Guillaume Gille’s men will challenge Denmark on Sunday in the final of the world championship.
Further proof of the impressive quality of the tricolor handball talent pool, the Blues even had to do without Nikola Karabatic, registered on the match sheet but clearly unfit to play due to a foot injury. No matter, the group coped, the Remili, Mahé & Co showering their Golgothic pivots, Ludovic Fabregas and Nicolas Tournat, with ten goals between them. In the cages, the bald Vincent Gérard, who left the field without having made a save in the quarter-finals, dominated his Swedish counterpart Palicka, with twelve parades. His partner Rémi Desbonnets, so brilliant two days ago, did not even put a toe on the ground.
French defensive impact
Admittedly, the absence through injury of Swedish superstar Jim Gottfridsson did not help the Scandinavians, but the defensive impact of the Blues very quickly put them in orbit. In the lead after ten minutes of play, they never released the grip. Sunday, the same kind of beauty will present itself to them: Denmark, double world champion in title, a collective game as oiled as Sweden, and a shovelful of individualities still a notch above. Insurmountable?