To qualify for the 2022 European Championship, they will have to take one of the top two places in their group or finish in the top four thirds of the eight qualifying groups.
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Le Monde with AFP
Four days after their defeat in Zrenjanin in Serbia, the French handball players snatched the draw against Serbia (26-26) on Saturday night in Créteil, and will fly away with little certainty for the World Cup-2021 in Egypt next week.
For their first two matches since the Euro-2020 fiasco (elimination in the 1st round of competition) and under the direction of Guillaume Gille, Michaël Guigou’s teammates have come up against Serbia twice: a defeat on the road four days ago (27-24) and a draw in extremis at Créteil on Saturday ( 26-26).
The scenario of the two meetings was on many points similar: a lead for Serbia of three goals in mid-t emps (15-12), the French who slowly returned to the score at the start of the second period with a goal behind (17-16) and the Serbs who escaped again.
Only on Saturday at Créteil, the French had the merit of hanging on, and coming back at the end of the game, helped by the two pivots, Ludovic Fabregas (5 goals out of 7 attempts) and Luka Karabatic (3/3), and two Serbian temporary exclusions in the last four minutes.
Les Bleus are tied twice by Kentin Mahé (24-24 then 26-26), and even had the match point, missed in the last two seconds by Timothey N’Guessan, little success on Saturday (4/10 shooting).
“Continue to work “
” Clearly, I’m not happy with the raw results. We set ourselves the goal of overturning this goal average and winning this match. Unfortunately we did not succeed. It is to the credit of the Serbs, who made two solid matches, but also to our failures, “admitted coach Guillaume Gille at the end of the meeting, at the microphone of beIN Sports.
There have been “mistakes in a large number of areas of the game, where we let our chances slip away, where we do not fully exploit our situations”, he added.
Defensively, the French failed to “take precedence over the Serbian attack”, failing in particular to “cut a pass through pivot, stop a shooter from afar “. Guillaume Gille however keeps the” state of mind “of the group which did not let go of the meeting.
For the qualification for Euro-2022, he There is no real danger in the remainder: to get to Hungary and Slovakia in twelve months, the French must finish in one of the first two places in their group, which includes Serbia, Greece and Belgium, or end up among the s four best thirds of the eight qualifying groups.
On the other hand, there is still “work” as Gille recognizes in the perspective of the World-2021, which begins in four days in Cairo, and in five days for the French against Norway, led by one of the best, if not the best player in the world, Sander Sagosen.
” We will have to keep working. That the victory was there, that would not have changed our work in the coming days “, indicated Guillaume Gille.