Coach: We Did Not Give Up Anyone, Including Pero

On Wednesday, the Croatian handball representatives will a play qualification match against Slovakia. On Saturday they will play Greece.

During the next six days, the Croatian national handball team will play two qualification matches for the European Championship in Austria in 2010. The team gathered in Zagreb on Sunday to prepare before they travel to Slovakia.

The handball players are aware that they will not have an easy job, because Slovakia have proven to be a dangerous team at the last World Handball Championship.

“They have a number of very good players. That is the team that eliminated Slovenia from the World Championship qualifications. We will try to resist them” said the Croatian coach Lino Cervar.

The players Duvnjak and Vori have the same opinion as the coach, who both know about the Slovaks that “broke” only at the very end of the match at the World Handball Championship in Zagreb.

“The match against Slovakia in Zagreb was not easy. They gave us lots of problems with counter-attacks, and we must not let them do that in Slovakia” said Domagoj Duvnjak.

The world’s best pivot Igor Vori says that they have to play smart against the players who mostly play in the Bundesliga.

Different line-up

The Croatian national handball team that will face Slovakia and Greece will look a lot different to the one that played at the World Handball Championship They players that will be missed the most are Petar Metlicic and Ivano Balic.

The absence of the second one caused a lot of controversy, because many saw this as the collapse of one generation.

“The fact that some are missing in these qualifications does not mean that we have abandoned them, and the least of all that it is the end of their representative career. The whole expert panel of the team negotiated and analysed with Zoran Gobac for three hours and at the end of there was an agreement that we will leave out some players. We did not give up anyone, including Pero who I have talked with” said coach Cervar about the absence of Balic.

Lino also apologised to all who have called him who did not receive a return call, because as he said: “I took my wife and went to Umag where I rested, because the last World Handball Championship exhausted me”. As he says, Lino rarely apologises, but he decided upon this move because he considers that he treated the journalists incorrectly, who have a lot of questions regarding the list of representatives.

Croatia’s match against Slovakia is scheduled for Wednesday at 5:30pm, and after the match the players will return to Croatia, in Osijek, where they will play against Greece.