Bronze goes to Kielce: Our dream stayed in the final

Posted on 31. May 2015.

The Polish champions Vive Tauron Kielce repeated the biggest success in the club’s history by winning the third place at the sixth VELUX EHF Champions League Final 4 in Cologne. Same as two years before, team from Kielce lost against Barcelona and beat THW Kiel for “bronze”…

– This match was completely different than the match 2 years ago. Then we led at the halftime by 7 goals. Today both teams were fighting for every single ball. It shows how much this game cost all players, they are after a long and hard season. We made fewer mistakes today. Secondly, in the goal, we saved difficult, seemingly 100%-chances. This is handball. I told during the interview for a German television that the audience was in 3/4 German, but it was our fans that could be heard. Talant Duyshebaev: Of course I must be happy about today’s victory, but my dream was fighting on the court in a 1st place game. I thank my players for the 60-minute fight, thanks to which we won the bronze medal. Tobias Reichmann: It was a very hard match. After the yesterday’s defeat we told ourselves that we couldn’t lose twice this weekend. Today we did what we could and in the end we’re happy we got the bronze medal – said Polish goalkeeper Sławomir Szmal.

Kielce’s playmaker Grzegorz Tkaczyk praised his team-mates:

– I wanted to win very much. That’s why I am here. It was hard to accept the yesterday’s defeat. We knew that the key to the victory would be in our heads. Today we showd we’re men. We won mentally and we can come back to Poland, to Kielce with our heads held high. It was a bit nervously at the end but taking the whole game into consideration, we played a very good game. Sławek Szmal performed amazing in the goal, Karol Bielecki scored very important goals, and Michał Jurecki did a great job as a pivot. However, our ambitions were higher than the third place. We already had bronze and now we wanted to play in final and rise the trophy afterwards.

TEXT: MARTYNA USNARSKA