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| The World’s Best Women’s Handball Player 14/01/2011 |
| (2011-01-14) |
| Last updated: 2011-01-17 12:54 EET |
Right now in Romania, the most popular sport in the country, namely football, has fallen well short of its supporters’ expectations. Given the national disappointment with the footballing world, recent performances in handball provide some comfort to sports fans.
In December 2010, Romania’s national women’s handball team walked home with the bronze medal they scooped at the European Championships, which was jointly hosted by Denmark and Norway. The other day, one of the national team’s former stars, Luminita Hutupan-Dinu, who retired to take up a coaching position, was selected as the best keeper in the entire history of women’s handball around the world.
On Thursday, the International Handball Federation made public that in 2010, another Romanian, Cristina Neagu, had been designated the world’s best handball player. We recall Neagu is acting as Oltchim Ramnicu Valcea’s inside left, as well as playing the same position for the national squad. No less than 25 percent of the respondents to the survey chose Cristina Neagu.
The respondents were made up of handball fans from around the globe, but also renowned specialists from the world of handball. Prior to receiving this significant award, Cristina Neagu had already been designated the European Championship’s “best young handball player”, was included in the final tournament’s ideal team, and was designated top player in her position in terms of the scorers’ standings and the classification of best passers.
The sports media in Bucharest celebrated by writing that “Neagu is Romania’s Messi”, trying to draw a parallel between the Romanian handball player and the famous Argentinean midfielder, recently selected as the world’s best footballer in 2010. The President of the Romanian Handball federation Cristian Gatu admitted “it was an honor for Romanian women’s handball to have a unanimously appreciated player.”
Gatu hoped such a distinction would positively influence the national team’s overall performance. Cristina Neagu herself said the award gave her a strong impetus to win as many trophies as possible with Oltchim Ramnicu Valcea, and Romania’s national team. The Romanian daily Adevarul regrets the widening gap between the women’s scintillating results and the mediocrity in which Romanian men’s handball has been mired for about two decades.
On Friday, that is on the very day the boys make their debut at the World Championships in Sweden, the aforementioned paper stated that the objective of the men’s team was “ to die a beautiful death.” Yet this lack of ambition only matches their lack of standing. Only one Romanian handball player of the national team, the inside Rares Jurca, was signed up by a foreign club, while the rest of the boys play in the dull domestic championship.
Only four handball players of the national team have participated in a final tournament before. We don’t often meet such cases of dramatic regress in the history of team sports: today’s lackluster squad comes after an impressive record set by the celebrated team Cristian Gatu used to be part of, a team that four times won the world title in the 1960s and 1970s.
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