Montpellier's many regrets

Montpellier could try to blame a lot of people for Sunday’s loss against Flensburg. But, at the end of the day, it is no-one's fault but theirs.

A win could have opened the gates to the Last 16, but this loss gave qualification to their opponents Flensburg, and forces Montpellier to battle until the end of the group phase.
 
Well ahead from the beginning of the game, Montpellier were already leading by four goals after thirteen minutes (7:3).

Issam Tej and Dragan Gajic were racking up the fastbreaks, especially the latter, who scored nine times in the first half alone.

Montpellier went back to the dressing room leading 14:12.

They even had a four goal margin, six minutes into the second half, at 16: 12. But then came Mathias Andersson.

Flensburg's goalkeeper had been quite shy for the first part of the match, but he was magnificent in the second, only conceding nine goals in 25 minutes.

In offense, Flenburg was finally finding solutions with Thomas Mogensen (their best scorer with six goals) and the left-handed Steffen Weinhold.

Nikola Karabatic, who missed the shot that could have tied the game ten seconds before the end of the game, had a relatively quiet game, with only four goals.

Patrice Canayer, Montpellier's head coach admitted to French newspaper L'Equipe: "We're in a complicated situation now. We should have killed the game, we had the ball to lead by five goals but we missed it.

“We'll have to get at least one good result away from home in the remaining three games, and God knows how hard it is to win in either Leon or Hamburg, definitely a bad run-in there."

Ljubomir Vranjes, head coach of Flensburg told L'Equipe: "We had a lot of injured players, so we mainly wanted to focus on defence. I asked my players not to play too fast in the first half, so we could still be fresh at the end of the game. It worked."