Pre-Match Report
Women's handballers under pressure in the European League
With one point from their three games to date, BVB are bottom of Group B. Ikast currently occupy second place, which would secure their progression to the quarter-finals. The Black & Yellows find themselves three points behind the Danes, which is why Sunday's match is so important. The other two teams, Ramnicu Valcea (five points) and Sola HK (two points), meet on Saturday afternoon. "We've had two away games so far and are now under pressure to win at least two of our remaining three games. But two of them are also home games in front of a great crowd, which we want to make the most of," said BVB coach Henk Groener.
BVB now have a new player in their ranks: the Black & Yellows have signed Netherlands international Lois Abbingh, who is already eligible to play in the match on Sunday. The versatile backcourt player arrives in Dortmund with Champions League experience and will provide an additional goalscoring threat.
The Borussia women, who are represented in three competitions – the Bundesliga, the DHB-Pokal and the EHF European League, have five games coming up over the next two weeks. "We're trying to rotate a lot and give every player game time in order to spread the workload. We lost our way briefly against Zwickau, but then made adjustments in a timeout." The two most recent league wins against Zwickau (31-25) and Göppingen (32-30) have given his team confidence again following a difficult phase – something the Borussia ladies will need in order to take revenge for the 29-25 defeat that they suffered in the reverse fixture in Denmark.
“We were too harmless at the beginning of the reverse fixture. We will need a top performance for 60 minutes against the team regarded to be the strongest opponent in the group," said Groener. Borussia got off to a poor start in the last meeting and were 5-0 down after just seven minutes. Lena Degenhardt equalised to make it 10-10 on the 23-minute mark, but the Black & Yellows were again caught napping at the start of the second period. With an 18-12 deficit after 37 minutes, they were simply too far behind to take anything tangible home from Denmark.
With the crowd at the Westpress Arena in Hamm behind them, the team hope to get revenge against Ikast on Sunday. Tickets are available in the Online Ticket Shop. The game will be broadcast live on Dyn from 13:45 CET.