3rd place for the title holders

3rd place for the title holders

The 3/4 Final of the 2008 Uniqa EHF Champions Trophy was an all-German matter. Nordhorn and Kiel were absolutely not satisfied on Saturday with the quality of their game, so it was a good opportunity to draw a better picture.

Kiel started the game much better. As it was the case a day ago, Kim Andersson was the most dangerous player in the team. The game was played on a high pace in the first 15 minutes and Kiel took a few goals lead.

Coach Lindgren has seen the problems and tried to call a time-out when it was 4-8 for Kiel. It did not help much and Kiel took an even bigger lead, 5-13. At this point Nordhorn pulled themselves together and closed the gap to five goals at halftime, 13-18.

Especially a former Veszprém player, Bjarte Myrhol enjoyed playing in front of the home crowd: he was awarded 7-m shots and he scored many important goals during the game.

With the leading of the Norwegian line player Nordhorn got back into the game within a few minutes in the second half and made it 18-20.

However, a better Kiel defending and goals coming from the fastbreaks of Kavticnik, Andersson and Klein gave a comfortable lead back to Kiel.

The endgame was less about intense fight and more about entertaining the fans

The third place decided by the all-German derby went to the title holder Kiel after winning 31-36.

Coach comments

Ola Lindgren (HSG Nordhorn): "The tournament was important for us and our objective was to improve respect to yesterday, but we were not able to. It was important to play against European top teams and learn from the games. Kiel won deservedly."

Alfred Gislason (THW Kiel): "We have done much better than yesterday and we showed that we can play better than against Ciudad Real."

Photos by Péter Komlósi (www.foto24.hu)