Zika Bogdanovic’s HANDBALL BLOG: 7 Against 6 – A Decade-Long Mistake
This day was supposed to be reserved for a column about Domen Makuc and a Bundesliga that is changing before our eyes. Then the news from Cairo took me in a completely different direction.
Only a few days later, Philippe Bana, president of the French Handball Federation and widely regarded as a possible successor to Hassan Moustafa at the helm of the IHF, said that playing seven against six “reduces the impact of suspensions”, disturbs the logic of the game and creates a certain form of inequality, especially in situations involving shots at an empty goal.
What has now been announced will very likely become reality.
It took the “fathers of handball” an entire decade to realize that this simply was not it.
Exactly ten years have passed since the rule truly came to life at the Olympic Games in Rio. For years after its introduction, some of the biggest authorities in handball criticized the way it was changing the philosophy of the game.
Over time, those voices became quieter.
Not necessarily because people had changed their minds, but because they had no other choice. Coaches had to adapt, accept the new reality and find the best possible solutions within it.
Alfred Gislason called seven against six “sabotage” and “boring handball”. Kim Rasmussen warned that it was “killing creativity”. Heiner Brand, Rolf Brack, Magnus Andersson, Guillaume Gille and Luka Karabatic were among those who raised serious questions about the rule.
More recently, Andreas Wolff was visibly furious with the way Austria played, building almost its entire attacking concept around playing without a goalkeeper.
Spanish coaches, for the most part, remained quiet.
They simply looked for ways to stay at the top in this part of the game as well.
And so an entire era passed before those making the decisions finally started to understand that this adventure might never have made much sense in the first place.
Because it did not merely add another tactical option.
It changed the very essence of handball.
In the meantime, another suggestion that was once discussed — introducing a time limit for attacks — has almost disappeared from the agenda, partly because the game itself has become significantly faster.
But another idea remains very much alive.
The idea of protecting defensive specialists through one simple rule: substitutions should only be allowed when a team has possession of the ball.
That kind of change could help us preserve players like Domen Makuc, the Cikusa brothers and others whose handball intelligence, creativity and technical quality should matter more than the ability to spend more time lifting weights in the gym than handling a ball in the hall.
Maybe that one will come next.
In ten years.
