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An unpleasant outcome in the current qualifying tournaments will make it difficult for the Latvian men’s handball team to get closer to the level achieved a few years ago. However, there is no shortage of rays of hope in the bigger picture of the sport’s future. “Very sad about the stumble in Luxembourg,” says the President of the Latvian Handball Federation (LHF), Aleksandrs Babra, considering non-qualification for the 2026 European Championship qualifying round. “However, the first goals for this team model are already long-term. We have to keep working because the potential for the team is good.”
After the European Championship debut in 2020 and the loss of the opportunity to apply for participation in the World Cup (World Cup) held a year later due to the pandemic, the national team experienced an extremely rapid generational change. In the transition period, almost all handball players who graduated from the school of the ASK team, which was disbanded more than ten years ago, have ended their careers, but promising young players in Latvia lack such a level of professional work in everyday life. “If we remove the goalkeeper Edgars Kukša, the adult national team is basically a youth team for us,” one of the coaches of the national team, Arnolds Straume, reminds us of the average age of the team, which is around twenty years in recent years.
Read the full article in newspapers Day in the Thursday, January 25th issue! If you would like to continue reading the newspaper’s content in print, you can subscribe here!
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