The national handball team will play against Brazil (Wednesday 2.30 pm, RTP2) and can already take a big step towards the goal of achieving the best ranking ever in a World Cup. A 10th place finish in 2021 is “more than possible” in this World Cup 2023, which takes place in Sweden and Poland and defends the DN, two of the best Portuguese handball players ever, Paulo Faria and Ricardo Andorinho.
After losing to Iceland (30-26) and beating South Korea (32-24) and Hungary (27-20), Portugal qualified in first place for the so-called main round, where he will play against Brazil, Cape Verde (20th) and Sweden (22nd).
“The game against Hungary went so well that it gives the national team a mega chance to write history again. The scenario was dark, Portugal had to win by seven goals. They started the game badly, only Miguel Espinha started to defend everything. he was 88% effective in the first 12 minutes, which is ruthless and no goalkeeper in the world does, and completely destroyed the Hungarian tactics, opening the game for Portugal , the best ever ranking is within reach The dream is at your fingertips,” said Paulo Faria, one of the most capped players in the history of Portuguese handball (118 matches until 1997).
In addition to Miguel Espinha’s gigantic performances in goal, the squad has the experience of Areias, Portela, Frade or Rui Silva and a new generation of players outside the box. “National teams owe 99% of their work to clubs and a lot of talent is coming. the kiko [Francisco Costa] and André Gomes, for example, have a unique way of playing, outside of traditional and so-called normal patterns. It’s good to have unformatted players. In my day we were relatively formatted, even the technical gestures were the same, a hip shot was a hip shot, a curl was a curl. Kids now have fantastic tech tools. Kiko’s speed of execution and shot left me speechless. André Gomes scores a goal with a half hip shot at 9 meters. Things we couldn’t do in my generation,” praised Paulo Faria, impressed by Kiko: “What he’s doing at 17 years old, I’ve never seen a player do at a world level.”
Ricardo Andorinho praises André Gomes. “He does things that a world handball super athlete doesn’t do, but those who don’t understand world handball have no idea how great his potential is,” emphasized the former player, who was vice president of the Portuguese handball federation between 2013 and 2018, the year he left to join João Benedito in Sporting’s candidacy for president. Andorinho was no longer looking from the inside and as a manager the best phase of Portuguese handball ever, but for someone like him who represented the national team 98 times until 2006, “It is a great pride to see Portugal play handball at the level of France and Spain”.
Paulo Fidalgo: “Brazil is a very complex opponent at World Cups. Sweden is European champion and Cape Verde is a selection that has many players with experience in Portuguese handball.”
Everything changed in 2016
Explaining success is something “very complex”, said Andorinho, who acknowledges that “it is now easy” to justify the options made by the Federation that led to the success of the selection at Euro 2020 (6th place ) and at the 2021 World Cup (10th place). .º), such as Paulo Pereira’s entry as coach in 2016: “He did an exceptional job of expanding the pool of selections, with four or five athletes per specific position, to give them completeness and pressure, but also to captivate them by telling them that they were among the best and that they had a chance to win.” going to the national team, which made them feel that if they weren’t called, it was because there was someone who was as good as or better than them.”
Paulo Faria goes even further in praising the coach, who was suspended for the first three games of this World Cup. “This generation has something absolutely admirable: they enter the field to win, with them the ‘let’s try’ and the ‘maybe today is enough’ are over. They want to win and they feel they are capable of winning I went to games where the dressing room said “today it will be almost impossible to win. This winning mentality is the merit of this generation and of Paulo Pereira”, defended the former handball player, now 50 years old.
In addition to the federation’s ambitious dialogue, progress has also been made at the level of the federative structure and the national leadership. Today, the staff ranges from goalkeeper coaches to statistical analysts. “The more complete the structures are, the closer you are to success and it seems to me that handball, Portuguese is very well structured and motivates through competence.”
Modality has lost practitioners
Handball is one of the most popular indoor sports in Portugal (with the exception of futsal and volleyball), but it has been losing players for several years and even the national team’s success in recent years cannot reverse this scenario. According to data from the Portuguese Institute of Sports and Youth, handball lost 18,214 players from 2018 to the end of 2021.
A relentless decline accentuated by the covid-19 pandemic: from 2020 to 2021, the modality lost 13,947 athletes (8,314 men and 5,633 women). Data for 2022 is not yet available, but should show an increase compared to 2021, when there were 31,447 practitioners, the lowest number of the decade.
Source: DN
