Kadetten take third place after narrow win

Kadetten Schaffhausen finish third in Group D of the VELUX EHF Champions League. That is a fact after the Swiss champions won their last group match at home against HCM Baia Mare 24:23 Thursday night.

Group D
Kadetten Schaffhausen (SUI) vs HCM Baia Mare (ROU) 24:23 (14:12)

Kadetten finish third and thereby highest among the teams who did not make it to the play-offs from Group D.

Thursday night, the Swiss champions finished their campaign this season with a narrow defeat against Baia Mare at home in the BBC Arena. Baia Mare had only 12 players on their team sheet, but the Romanian champions still managed to hang in throughout the 60 minutes.

The visitors even had the slightly better start into the game and had several one goal leads within the first quarter of an hour. Towards half time, however, Kadetten, who had a complete roster of 16 players for the match, managed to benefit from their deeper bench to get three goals ahead and from the beginning of the second half, the home team continued to lead by a couple of goals for the remainder of the match.

Twelve minutes and 20 second into the second half, Alexandru Sabou equalised to 18:18 - the first time the game was even since 8:8 and the match seemed completely open at this point. Yet, after this equaliser, the visitors had a goal drought of no less than nine minutes and 20 seconds and even though Kadetten only got three goals away in that time, Baia Mare never managed to catch up.

Throughout the match, the Baia Mare defence had particular problems with Kadetten´s right back Dimitrij Küttel, who scored nine goals. The Bosnian playmaker, Ivan Karacic, scored five times for Baia Mare.

Kadetten's head coach, Markus Baur, showed his mixed emotions at the conclusion of the group phase. "First of all, my respect for Baia Mare for fighting under such difficult circumstances. Both teams made a lot of mistakes but after having changed our defence, we played better. At the end, we were more lucky. We are happy with the 3rd place, but it's not what we wanted. We'll come back next season!"