We are friends we Carlos, not acquaintances

“ Coming to Veszprem was a big challenge since the club itself has been in top flight for countless years- said Xavier. “We wanted to build a team which has a big chance of making the Final Four. We knew that it was going to be difficult, but we kept on believing.”

You are top of a Champions League group in which there are two earlier Final Four finalists. Has it surprised you?

To be honest, yes. We didn’t expect to be so successful so early. We didn’t think that we would be able to play handball with such confidence. 5 months on, we can be thankful for having such a great group of young Hungarian players that are eager for success. They knew from day 1 about what we wanted to accomplish. They acclimatised themselves according to our tactics very quickly. This is why we had such an amazing time so far.

There was that 7 goal loss to Szeged.

After the match, I sat down with Carlos and started to analyze what went wrong. We started asking questions of ourselves. Have we been doing things correctly? After a few days we came to the conclusions. Yes. Every big club has bad games, and I think that the loss came at exactly the right time. It shook and woke us up.

The fans think that if Veszprem doesn’t win the CL this year, then they will have to wait another 10 years for it to happen. Would you agree?

I wouldn’t agree. One thing is for sure, Barcelona and Kiel will be in the Final Four. There are 6 other teams that are in contention for the remaining places. As you can see, it is going to be very very tight. I wouldn’t agree that we would have to wait another 10 years. It is true that we just started our work here in Veszprem, but we have already achieved big things! Quite a number of things depend on luck, so hopefully we get all our players back from the World Cup without any injuries.

What has been the highlight of the season so far?

The fans have been amazing. It seems to me that everyone across the country likes MKB Veszprem. There is one other thing I have come to enjoy. Goulash Soup!

Bezdek Márk