The sport is not a war, although they are compared from Homer's Iliad, and no team has exemplified it better than this Spain. Two samples. The first: minutes before playing it all, as the first semifinal lengthened, the selection, full of parents, was entertained in the playground mounted inside the Stockholm Tele2 Arena, while his rival, Slovenia, was dying of nerves for The hallways of the pavilion. The second: minutes after qualifying for his third consecutive European final, that Alex Dujshebaev closed a game that lasted too long, players like Julen Aguinagalde or Viran Morros played with a ball on their feet and imagined a game. There is no battle here, there are no heroics; Here is a group of friends having dinner on the terrace one summer night.
Dispossessed by the age of exaltation and aware of the family impact of his sport, the team beat Slovenia (34-32) having a pleasant time. It was hard to say goodbye, but that was the least of it. This set is history, of course it is, only the Magnus Wislander Sweden had remained so much on the top of the continent, but he lives it daily. One of the players admitted in the semifinal preview, that his partner would not be in the stands because - "you know" - he could not have asked for the day. It is the attitude that goes with a handball. Or vice versa.
This Spain makes everything easy and how difficult this is. Almost impossible. It is made up of players who have deciphered all the riddles that their sport posed and now simply enjoy their knowledge. There was Daniel Sarmiento , for example, moving the 14 men on the track at will, now to one side, now to another, and suddenly, a back pass to Ferran Solé at the end. There was Raúl Entrerrío s, another example, playing trilero, where is the ball, where is the ball, until a plucked Slovenia found her behind her goalkeeper, Klemen Ferlic . The difference that the European semifinal decanted was opened at the end of the first part (13-9, min. 20) and if it did not happen before it was because the team led by Jordi Ribera woke up with two losses in his statistics and a 0 -2 against.
When he cleaned the legañas and went to work in defense, he began his exhibition between very fast counterattacks by Ángel Fernández , who was just coming out of a stomach virus, and Solé. Slovenia helped a lot and wanted to win Spain being Spain and that, alas, is a reckless. They just went back to collide, they let the team play and played, wow they played. In the second part, the challenge for the Spanish team was to prevent the meeting from rising again and it was achieved until, at the end, nonsense, a header, complicated the outcome. Slovenia, more by faith than by game, scored a goal (33-32, min. 59) and it took a genius of Alex Dujshebaev, somewhat of a portentous hip, to finish what started. It became long, frankly. And the environment did not help.
Absent Spanish and Slovenian from the stands, the Norwegian and Croatian fans who filled the stands of Tele2 Arena left or simply stayed there for dinner and nobody celebrated the goals, the stops. Spain simply won the match, secured his eighth medal in a European, his third consecutive continental final, that is, he made history and left, that he had to pick up the children, to go through the super, to scrub the dishes, the everyday things.
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