Preview of ehfTV.com Match of the Week

Both have a 100 percent clear record on international ground, but both teams surprisingly lost their top matches in the domestic or regional leagues – on Sunday (18:00 hrs local time) Metalurg Skopje will face Vive Targi Kielce in the ehfTV Match of the Week with English live commentary by Tom Ó Brannagáin.

It is the top class of the two leading teams of group C of the VELUX EHF Champions League with the maximum of eight points each.

It took host Metalurg only two hours to sell all seats in the Boris Trajkovski arena for the match. Macedonians are handball-crazy, so the Polish side know what to expect.

“It will be really noisy game in a great atmosphere,” said Croatian born Kielce wing players Ivan Čupić on the official Metalurg website www.rkmetalurg.mk.

Čupić – currently third best scorer of the VELUX EHF Champions League - will face some well-known faces, especially on the Metalurg bench, where his former national team coach Lino Červar formed an European top team.

“I am sure that Lino will have a perfectly adapted tactics against the way we play, but I hope that we can take the points in this highly important match, as we want to finish first in our group,” Čupić said.

Metalurg had started brilliantly in the season by winning at Chambéry – and this victory boosted the Macedonian champions, which are quite equal with the national team. Three more victories followed especially thanks to their splendid defence and the performances of their Slovenian newcomer Renato Vugrinec.

The only defeat of Metalurg occurred in the regional SEHA league, when they were beaten by a last-second goal by their Skopje arch rival Vardar. And the story is the same for Kielce, as they lost their top match in the Polish league at runners-up Orlen Wisła Płock.

Both teams have some injury problems: Kielce had to replace Rastko Stojković and Grzegorz Tkaczyk in their last league match and on Metalurg side it is uncertain, if Naumče Mojsovski, Vančo Dimovski and goalkeeper Peter Angelov will be able to play.

After losing against Płock, Vive Targi Kielce’s dress-rehearsal for the ehfTV.com Match of the Week was close to perfection, as the team of coach Bogdan Wenta beat Czuwaj Przemyśl clearly 44:14 on Wednesday– the clearest ever result in the era of Wenta at Vive Targi.

After the defeat against Płock, right back Krzysztof Lijewski hopes that “this was a single failure. We have to play as a team, then we are successful”, as he is quoted on the Kielce website www.vivetargi.pl.

But maybe the previous international results of the Metalurg women’s team are a good omen for Sunday’s host, as they had beaten Polish side Lublin twice in the EHF Cup Winners’ Cup.

Follow the ehfTV Match of the Week on Sunday, 18:00 hrs local time here