Day review 1: Close results on opening night as German teams both win
Two draws, two one-goal wins: the group matches of the EHF European League Men 2024/25 threw off Tuesday evening with a string of close results in the early eight-game time slot of round 1. RK Gorenje Velenje and GOG (35:35) as well as CSM Constanta and Ystads IF HF (29:29) shared the points, while Sport Lisboa e Benfica and MOL Tatabanya KC both celebrated the closest of wins.
SG Flensburg-Handewitt, however, opened their title defence with a thumping 42:25 win over MRK Sesvete, while fellow German contenders VfL Gummersbach returned to the European stage with a 37:35 victory against IK Sävehof. Eight more matches were scheduled for the late time slot.
This was a very good game. If someone had told us before the game we would draw against GOG, we would have taken the point. We are of course disappointed we didn't win, but it's a good foundation to build on. We wanted this win, in the end it wasn't enough, but I am proud of our performance and my teammates.
We are satisfied with the point, we didn't expect to come here and win easily. We know we will play many hard matches this season and this one was nothing different. In Europe it's sometimes difficult to play against teams that play a different brand of handball, and Velenje showed exactly that. They were smarter than us.
We had a very bad start in the game. This costed us a lot of power. In the second half we had not enough energy to play the profitable game passes. And in the end we also missed the lucky punch.
It was a difficult match for us. We didn't expect to win here and I think they played better than us. In the second half we have been in big troubles but our goalkeeper made the difference and we were able to keep calm and quiet, this was very important for us.
It was cool to see a project like Sesvete; they played very bravely. The highlight of the day was Thilo’s [Knutzen, who scored five times] first game. The arena was on fire when Thilo came in.
