Poland ease to second win in a row

A frustrated Jovanka Radicevic was evidence that her Montenegro side were not firing on all cylinders as Poland took advantage and sped to a 13:6 lead in a 10-minute, 7:0 scoring run (13:6, 25th minute) to pull ahead and never look back.

Both teams were playing their last game of Spain 2021 and will now look towards the 2022 European Championship in less than a year, with Montenegro already qualified as one of the three host nations.

The result for Montenegro was their fourth loss in a row.

MAIN ROUND GROUP I
Poland vs Montenegro 33:28 (16:9)

‘The Project’ as Poland coach Arne Senstad calls his work with the national team, continues to evolve as the first substitute nation of the Continental Confederation of Europe for Spain 2021 (after missing the 2019 IHF Women’s World Championship and later awarded a Wild Card place) took down Montenegro by five goals in their first-ever meeting in the competition.

That seven-goal, 10-minute run early on set the scene and a lacklustre Montenegrin side simply could not match the buoyancy of their opponents, who went in at the break exactly seven goals up (16:9).

Even with a firing attack, Poland saw their goalkeeper Adrianna Placzek make 12 saves, more than double the entire total of the Montenegrin pair (five saves) and rightly awarded the best player of the match.

While Placzek may remember the game fondly, Radicevic will not – in her 52 previous World Championship games with her country, she had only failed to score once, but today it was the second time as she could only manage two shots in the whole 60 minutes.

“We started good but in the middle of the first half we didn’t score and they took those chances to come in front,” said Montenegro coach Bojana Popovic. “Poland have good shooters and we tried to stop them and we didn’t do those things in the first half. In the second half we were better but it was not enough.”

In their six games at Spain 2021, Montenegro only won once, a 30:20 preliminary round win against Angola, with losses against Slovenia (18:28), France (19:24), Serbia (25:27) and RHF (25:31) coming before, while Poland ended on a high with wins against Slovenia and now Montenegro.

“We are really happy we finished with victory,” said Placzek. “We got everything on the last game, we fight and we started really good. I'm so happy that we finished with two points as this was really important for us.”

hummel Player of the Match: Adrianna Placzek, Poland