Lithuania and Italy win big, Kosovo seal shock draw
There were big shocks in the second round of the EHF EURO 2026 Qualifiers, with Lithuania taking a 29:27 win against North Macedonia and Italy beating Serbia, 31:30. Kosovo drew against the Netherlands, 33:33, with Poland sealing a last-gasp one-goal win against Romania, after they blew a nine-goal lead. Usual suspects like Germany, Hungary, Spain and Iceland all secured big wins.
I am proud of the boys, but of course, it's a bit disappointing that the point didn’t slip through our fingers. Today, we defended harder than Macedonia. We're trying to instill in the players that we need to mentally reach the point where we believe we can beat teams like that.
We played a very good first half, defended well and got some easy goals. In the beginning of the second half we lacked a bit of concentration, Finland won the first minutes 5-0, but after that we came back again. I am happy with the result, we have now four points from two matches. That is a good start and we can now look forward to World Championships before resuming the qualification campaign.
The second half was good from us while the first one definitely was not. I needed to take two early timeouts to get the game going better. After that and especially after the interval it was much better. I am partly satisfied, partly dissatisfied. Hungary are a very strong team and we were able to score 15 goals in the second half. We will take the positives from the second half with us.
It was a very difficult match, we were four goals down 15 minutes before the end but we showed great heart and played until the very end. It is a great satisfaction, it was very important to win also thanks to the public who made themselves heard and pushed us a lot.
I would like to thank all the players for a great week of intense training and two wins at the same time. I think it's hard when you have a lot of new players and you put out a performance like that. So thanks to the experienced players who helped the team take a step forward and the young players who did a great job. Tomas Mrkva was outstanding. We were good from the wings, at the same time Lukáš Morkovský played great. Discipline was the difference. The balance between defence and fast attack was great.
We are very happy. We knew that the Faroe Islands are a very strong opponent, they have extremely strong individual players. We also prepared for their 7-on-6 game. But we also used the 7-on-6 game in attack and thus used their weapons against them and turned the game around. We don't want to think about third place. We want to go to the European Championships confidently from second place or to challenge for first place. Why not?
A draw in the first game at home against Israel wasn't the best performance for us. I'm happy that we played 40 minutes very good handball. We need to work on our shot efficiency.
We missed all the one-on-ones with the goalkeeper. We couldn't recover in time, we conceded 5-6 goals and obviously panicked. We had an extraordinarily good second half. We started the match very weakly in defence, we tried to change the system. I congratulate my players for coming back and doing everything they could!
We won beautifully against a team that tied in Poland and today, the Polish team won against Romania. We are well ahead and did incredible work, we only had three practices to prepare for the first match and it is always difficult when you have different routines in the clubs. Today we played better, we executed better and also their goalkeeper wasn't as good as the Romanian one, in defence we pressured more and were more active and this is the Portugal we want.
We knew we were very tired from the match against Poland and it was even more difficult with the injury we had with our left back and everything went down and with many mistakes, Portugal punished us a lot. We had a few moments where we could make the match a little bit difficult for them but a lot of mistakes threw us off, this was tough.
We fell one point short today. It hurts that we weren't rewarded with two points after this performance. It was down to little things. Huge respect for this team. A reaction like that after the Germany game is really impressive.
