Russian duo crucial for CSM; FTC, Brest and Storhamar goalkeepers shine
Round 2 of the EHF Champions League Women 2026/27 started with five games on Saturday. In group A, CSM Bucuresti, FTC-Toyota Kovács and Brest Bretagne Handball all took their second wins in the tournament by big margins on home court.
In group B, seven-time champions Györi Audi ETO KC also maintained their perfect run, beating Nykøbing Falster Håndbold, while Storhamar Håndball Elite took their first points in the current competition, winning at HSG Blomberg-Lippe.
The match was what I hoped for. I think we have a stronger team at the moment than Krim, they have a new coach, a new system, new players. The overall performance was good; of course the last 10 minutes where we dropped some goals is of course not the happiest end of this match.
We know we are a young team with many young players, and a lot of things are new for us. So when you come under big pressure like we did today, things can go very badly or very wrong. That’s a little bit of what happened today. Luckily, we managed to stabilise things a little towards the end of the second half, and we are trying to build on that.
I am happy with the points and how the girls performed. The game had its ups and down, in the second half I think we did a better job in defence and we managed to take a bigger lead.
It is always nice to come back and play here, it’s always a great atmosphere. It is hard to come back from a big goal difference but we will continue to fight and work more and more to fix the things that didn’t work today.
Tonight was our first game where we played really well both in defence and in attack. We played as a true team and were really committed from start to finish, just as the coach asked us to be. I’m really happy with the performance. I just hope we can continue like this because we still have a lot to improve.
I think we played a good first half. We were in control and things were going well. In the second half, though, I’m not really sure what happened. We lost a bit of confidence, made too many mistakes, and Brest punished us for them.
We defended pretty well, just like last week, and that’s why I’m disappointed because I believe we could have got something out of this game today. We had problems with the backcourt shots that Storhamar forced us to take.
Before the game, we knew that Blomberg had good goalkeepers, and that’s exactly where we had our problems in the first half. Afterwards, we finished our chances better, scored more goals, and in the end that was the decisive point.
I received a lot of balls on the wing, and the key to that was our great defensive performance. We prepared thoroughly for their seven-on-six attack, and we managed to score some quick goals from the turnovers we forced.
We knew it would be a difficult game, especially as we only came here with eleven players. We tried to do everything we could, we played a good game, and we can learn a lot from it. We are a small team from Denmark, and we want to develop, but to do that, we have to embrace challenges like this and take them head-on.
