Season end recap: Champions League

Considering the Champions League draw, we are going to start our series of articles with the summary of the CL.

 

In the 2014/15 VELUX EHF Champions League the aim of MKB-MVM Veszprém was to qualify into the Final 4 and to gain a more illustrious position than the year before. The team succeeded in getting into the final but was defeated by Barcelona so they became silver medallist again. The players, however, have been through a tough period to get there.

 

 

Veszprém got into the C group and during the draw the team got the hardest possible opponents from almost all pots (Vardar, Löwen, Montpellier, Celje, Medvedi). We played our first match on September 27 in Russia and ended up with a five-goal victory (32:37). This was followed by two tight home victories against Löwen (27:24) and Montpellier (30:29). Then, we travelled to Celje we had a hard game but we managed to gain two points (21:24). On November 15 we played the most exciting game of the season in Skopje, hosted by Vardar. We were able to change the result (23:24) thanks to Mikler’s penalty save, Ugalde gaining ball and Ilic’s successful penalty. This was again followed by home victories against Vardar (32:24) and Medvedi (38:31). Then, we went to Mannheim knowing that if we defeat Löwen, we can end the autumn season without any mistakes considering all tournaments. Unfortunately, our team was defeated (32:25) which was the first loss in 2014/15 season. We had a total of three losses, including the two CL defeats.

 

We continued CL in the middle of February when we won against Celje (29:26) which meant that we became group winners in the “death group”; therefore we played in Montpellier without any stake and ended the group round with triumph.

 

In the eighth final we were facing the Spanish Naturhouse La Rioja against whom we could win easily (23:31, 37:31). In the quarter final - as in the previous year – we had to fight with PSG to get into Final 4 in Cologne. We had a good start in Paris but the home team closed up and the game was ended with a draw (24:24). On April 19 in Veszprém Arena we showed who is the better team and had a six-goal triumph (34:28) and got into CL Final 4 for the second time in the team’s history.

 

 

Then, the most important event of men’s handball occurred in the last two days of May in Cologne, where our team and fans arrived with big hopes. Our opponent team in the semi-final was THW Kiel, who defeated us in the quarter final in 2013 and in the semi-final in 2014 so we wanted to take revenge. This game was obviously expected to be extremely hard. MKB-MVM Veszprém was playing hard even in the first half when Kiel was about to win. They ended the first half with a draw. In the second half we were able to overtake the “Zebras” and get into the final (23:31) where we faced Barcelona. In the final, however, the team was really tired; we might have weakened more than the Spanish team during the semi-final. Moreover, during the entire Final 4 Coach Ortega could not count on Ugalde who had hand injury. Barcelona had an excellent defence during the whole game so they deserved to win (28:23). Nikola Karabatic from Barca became the most valuable player of Final 4 and Momir Ilic from our team became the top scorer for the second time with 114 goals.