Mairot's game: "To me, handball is a cat-and-mouse game"

Clarisse Mairot arrived on the biggest stage with a bang. At the Women’s EHF EURO 2024, her first major event with France, she impressed with being fearless and perseverant, as always.

“This depicts just the way I am in real life, actually. I am kind of the same on and off the court,” she says.

Either with the national team or with Brest Bretagne Handball in the EHF Champions League Women, the left back is used to going the unusual way.

“That is the way I have always been playing. From when I was very young, I understood that I would not be the two-meter tall player who can shoot from 10 metres. I can do that every now and again, but that is clearly not my strong point.”

Now 25, Mairot had to develop her own way in order to make it to the top in handball. Develop other qualities. And use her strengths to use her opponents’ weaknesses.

“I have always been quite sturdy, but I have to develop that even more. I take a lot of hits and blows when I am on the court, because I use a lot of one against one,” she says. “The power in my legs has always been among my strong points, so I try to work on that a lot.”

But for taking hits for 60 minutes, a player must build a shell to feel protected. The more muscular you are, the less the hits will actually hurt you.

“Honestly, if I can avoid them, or if I can avoid falling on the floor at full-speed, I will,” Mairot says. “My tactics are to be really quick and try to avoid my opponents as much as possible. And if they manage to catch me, to push as hard as I can to get as much advantage as I can get.”

So, Clarisse Mairot’s game is a refined mix of speed and power — a mix that has to be worked on, day in, day out. But not every day is the same in Brest.

“The more you get into the season, the less you focus on the heavy stuff and the more you will work on how you can be explosive,” Mairot says. “Our physical trainer helps me finding the right balance. I have to be strong enough to be able to take hits and also to put my legs where I need to shoot strong. But too many muscles mean that I can not be as quick as I need, so it’s really fine tuning.”

These muscles and this playing intelligence give her the opportunity to deliver, once in a while, what she will describe as her favourite action on the court. “When the ball comes from the side, the defence moves along with the ball and I just go exactly the opposite way, in the perfect timing, and then you get a shot, now that’s something I like,” Mairot explains. “This one-versus-one in tight situations, small spaces, this is what I am best at.”

Those situations deliver the perfect definition of handball, she adds.

“To me, handball is a cat-and-mouse game. And in this situation, I am the mouse and I am trying to avoid being caught by the cat.”

The physical aspect is where Clarisse Mairot has made the most progress since making her to the top-level handball with Besançon in the early 2020s.

“I was thinner, way less muscular. I guess this is the main thing that I notice when I see footage of myself on the court from a couple of years ago.”

But along the way, and especially since making her arrival in Brest and in the national team, Mairot has taken more responsibilities than ever before.

“It always felt kind of natural to me. This is not something that I am running after, like, I don’t want to do it to be in the spotlight. Even when I was younger, I never saw myself as my team’s saviour. But I don’t shy away from it, either. If this is, in my opinion, the best way to help my team, then I will ask myself no question about it.”

Taking responsibilities might be something that some of the young players will leave to the older ones, but the Brest Bretagne player is certainly not one of them. She actually admits that she is “galvanised” by the moments and definitely “not stressed” about carrying her team on her shoulders in tough moments.

And the same applies when it comes to tight games, that can be decided on one or two balls.

“I feel at peace in these moments, not really stressed,” says the left back, who has her Sandrine Mariot-Delerce — a 2003 world champion with France — as a role model when she was younger.

“I try to think a little bit about what the best solution would be to score the decisive goal, but not too much. When I was younger, I would just be full gas in these situations; these days, I try to use my brain to find the best solution and not just run as fast as possible or push as hard as possible.”

Either way, overthinking things has always played against the France national team player, who is the regular penalty shooter with her teams. While other players would use a lot of video footage to analyse their opponents, Mairot goes the other way.

“In terms of goalkeepers, every time I did try to study my opponent, it took away my natural and it was not a success,” says Mairot, coming back to her cat-and-mouse analogy. “You have to calculate what the goalkeeper will think you will be doing and try to trick it. And you have to find different ways, as you might shoot 15 shots in the same game.”

So far, the mouse has been pretty successful at avoiding the cat, and the bigger the cat, the more efficient the mouse has seemed to be.

“The bigger the stage, the more energised I am. I like the tension and I like to play for big things. This is where, I think, I am able to deliver the best.”

all photos © kolektiff / Anze Malovrh (incl. main image), Jozo Cabraja, Nebosja Tejic