Handball – The Füchse Berlin have a break problem

The Füchse Berlin currently have a rather unusual problem. The half-time break doesn’t seem to be going well for the German runner-up. The Berlin handball players were clearly in the lead three times after 30 minutes. Things got tight three times in the second half. At the Rhein-Neckar Löwen in the round of 16 of the DHB Cup a little over a week ago, they were four goals ahead at halftime, in the following game in the Bundesliga against Hamburg they were even six goals ahead, and in the Champions League on Thursday against Dinamo Bucharest the Berliners were ahead went into the break with an eight-goal lead.

In the end they were still eliminated from the cup. In the league HSV managed a lucky draw. After the two disastrous halves in Mannheim and Hamburg, Füchse managing director Bob Hanning took extra time for a crisis discussion with coach Jaron Siewert and his team. In this respect, the 38:29 home win against Bucharest can be seen as a significant improvement. Even if the Berliners had to tremble again against the Romanian league leaders in section two.

“You could see that there were a few things wrong with us, that we always play well for 30 minutes in the first half and then collapse in the second half,” said right winger Tobias Reichmann, critical despite the win. In front of 6,444 spectators in the Max-Schmeling-Halle, the Füchse were also the dominant team at the start on Thursday. In attack, almost everything went through the Danish Olympic champions Mathias Gidsel and Lasse Andersson, who scored eleven goals together in the first half. Because the Foxes’ defense was also solid – at one point Bucharest failed to score for almost eight minutes – the Berliners went into the dressing room with a deserved 22:14 lead.

“The first half was almost perfect,” praised Füchse coach Jaron Siewert after the game, only to immediately add: “At the beginning of the second half we had problems again, like in the last two games.” As the game length increased The Berliners lost more and more control in the second half. The explosive offense sputtered and the defense revealed ever larger gaps. Bucharest was able to reduce the gap little by little. Ten minutes before the end, Berlin’s lead had dwindled from eight to three goals. The Füchse fans in the hall became more and more nervous, especially when, with the score at 29:26, the next attack seemed to come to nothing. But with the last permitted action, Fabian Wiede managed a flat shot through the legs of the Bucharest defense and into the bottom right corner of the goal.

»It was a close game again, we didn’t want that. But we got through the tight phase much better this time,” said coach Siewert, pleased with the strong nerves of his team, which was able to rely primarily on world handball player Mathias Gidsel in the final minutes. After Wiede’s lucky goal, Siewert brought the Dane back into the game after a long break. With Gidsel on the field, the Berliners scored in each of their eight attacks until the final whistle. The 25-year-old finished the game as top scorer with seven goals and five assists – and he viewed the victory as an important step for his team to get out of the half-time crisis: “We only had a three-goal lead, but we stayed cool and calm. « After the game, the Dane was sure: »This was perhaps even more important for our process as a team than the two points today.«

But they should also be very important in the Champions League. After eight match days, the Foxes are in fifth place with four wins and four defeats. If there was another defeat against Bucharest, contact with the first four teams in Group A would have been lost. Now the Berliners are only two wins behind group runners-up Paris Saint-Germain with six games remaining. For the next Champions League game in the French capital next Thursday, backcourt ace Gidsel formulated an ambitious goal: “We’re trying to attack second place and not look at fourth or fifth place.” Because only the first two Teams from Group A are certain to reach the quarter-finals of the handball premier class.

Before that, the Füchse still have the Bundesliga home game against TVB Stuttgart this Sunday. Another opportunity to finally shake off the break problem. Even against the second-to-last team in the table, 30 minutes of good handball is unlikely to be enough. And against Paris at the latest, the Berliners need another top performance over the full season.