26/09/2026
Day two of the Club World Champs brought the first placement game against Los Angeles Team Handball Club - a first time participant who however brought some high calibre players such as Danish goalkeeper Frank Krone Mikkelsen (awarded player of the match) and Slovenian centre back Andraz Velkavrh (top scorer at 10 goals).
To cut a long story short, this was not a great game for the lions, and the end result of 17:28 was bitterly disappointing. Against a clever and robust 5:1 defense, our attacking game was stuttering for 60 minutes. The team paid dearly for a very poor attacking performance in first 20 minutes, with just 2 goals on the score board, and 9 received.
As usual, the boys in blue and gold would not give up though, fighting back to a 7:12 half time result, and still being very much in the game at 13:17 after 45 minutes. At this point, the batteries seemed to rapidly deplete though, driving the number of errors up and handing LA a few welcome gifts. The experienced US team accepted thankfully, and drove home a deserved win.
While our team was solid in defense throughout, and certainly put on the fight one would expect, our attack lacked energy, grit and determination, topped off by an unhealthy number of errors. Certainly not what the game plan was.
There are some good news in this story too however - this was only the first leg of two placement games, so on Sunday at 11:00 local time (10:00 in 🇪🇺, 18:00 in 🇦🇺) we have a rendez-vous with LA again. And we reckon it's time for redemption!
Please support our amateur team here:
https://makeachamp.com/sydneyunihandballclub
We'd like to thank our great sponsors and partners:
Adina Hotels
Geff Sport
Navitas English
Rose Gleisbau
Sydney Uni Sport & Fitness
