Kolding in CL fever

The city of Kolding is burning in Champions League fever with less than a week until the group stage. Denmark´s sixth largest city with close to 89,000 citizens was represented in the EHF Champions League no less than seven times, but their latest CL adventure was three years ago. There was such an interest in tickets that all seats for the home match against FC Barcelona Borges (on 6 March 2010) are already sold…

The 28-year old right back and Danish international, Kasper Søndergaard, talks to Eurohandball.com about his expectations.

Eurohandball.com: This will be your second CL season of your career after playing with Arhus. What are your expectations?

Kasper Søndergaard: I’m really looking forward to the challenge as my team mates. This is a big chance for us to try ourselves against great teams of Europe.

Eurohandball.com: Barcelona, Kiel, Ademar, Zürich and Skopje are coming up. What about the chances?

Kasper Søndergaard: I think we should be ale to finish in the top three, but maybe a fourth place would do. After that, we will simply have to hope for a “reasonable” opponent in the Last 16 and from then on, we will just have to see what happens.

Eurohandball.com: Danish national coach, Ulrik Wilbek, believes that you have a good chance for the third place and Ciudad Real could come in the Last 16. He also believes you could reach the quarterfinals. Do you agree?

Kasper Søndergaard: That sounds like a fair analysis. Ciudad are not even near as strong as last season. However, they are probably still not a team we can compare to. We would still have to play extremely well and at the same time they should probably have a pretty bad day. But I’d rather speak about this later…

Eurohandball.com: Your first task will be Vardar Skopje away…

Kasper Søndergaard: Their home court is pretty “insane”… Actually, I don’t know their team very well, but I’m sure we will collect lot of information before the match.