Victory without top form

Michael Knudsen had to smile. The Danish pivot was chosen Man of the Match together with Drammen’s back player, Frode Hagen. Knudsen was awarded a not so fitting gift, a Norway national shirt. “What shall I do with it?” asked the pivot. “Within three months I will play for Denmark at the European Championship.”

This event, in fact, matched the performance of Flensburg. They were neither fish nor fowl. “It was surely not optimal,” said Michael Knudsen after the lacklustre 33:30 success in Drammen. “If we would have given more than 50-70 percent, we could have played a more impressive and easier game.”

For this evening in the half sold out Drammenshallen, the Bundesliga team had too many bad performances. The right side of the attack, Torge Johannsen and Marcin Lijewski, were not in their best form. Anyway, they depended on Alexander Petersson, who was not completely healthy after an illness.

The two goalkeepers were unlucky this day, Dane Sijan had an exceptionally weak 6:0 defence and he had to reach 9 times in the goal for the ball already in the first 10 minutes of the game. Drammen were leading 9:6. His colleague, Dan Beutler, played very little time because he was injured on his nose. The Swedish had to leave the hall and came back for ten minutes as Dane Sijan did not get in form yet. At this point the Flensburg team took control of the game, but they could not reach more than that: “In this phase we should have wrapped it up,” said Flensburg’s coach, Kent-Harry Andersson about the many mistakes.

After the third suspension of Michael Knudsen the score was 30:32 with a Frode Hagen goal and just 70 seconds from the end there was still some hope for the home team. But then came Ljubomir Vranjes with the last goal of the day and decided the game.