Poland hit hard by injury problems

Their heads are high even though a series of injuries have hit Poland hard:

"We had a short but intense preparation. Now I hope that we can start our mission successfully in Serbia and I hope even more that we’ll be spared from additional setbacks," Polish coach Bogdan Wenta said before leaving for Serbia.

After reaching second place in their final preparation tournament in Denmark below the host, but ahead of Slovenia and Iceland, Wenta nominated his 16 players for the EHF EURO. Ten of them play for Polish clubs – in contrast to previous events, when most of the squad played for German clubs.

This fact is mostly due to improvement of the Polish clubs, as Kielce and Plock are part of the VELUX EHF Champions League, although some injuries also had an influence on squad selection.

Goalkeeper Slawomir Szmal, right back Marcin Lijewski, and the back court players Tomasz Rosinski and Bartlomiej Tomczak are out of the EHF EURO.

Most of the nominated players come from Plock (Wichary, Kwiatkowski, Syprzak, Wisniewski) and Kielce (M. Jurecki, Tkaczyk, Zaremba, Kuchczynski). Even so, there are still five players from Bundesliga clubs (Bielecki, Krzysztof Lijewski, Jaszka, Tluczynski and Bartosz Jurecki), and they are key factors for "mission Olympic Qualification tournaments".

Due to the revised situation, team captain Grzegorz Tkaczyk doesn’t consider the Polish team in the favourite role in their Preliminary Round Group A in Belgrade, where they are grouped with host Serbia, Denmark (runners-up of the 2011 World Championship), and Slovakia:

"We like to be the underdog. You cannot calculate what will happen during an EHF EURO, so we have to focus on each match."

For Wenta, the Slovaks are the least experienced opponents, and he is aware of their opening match against Serbia: "We know what we can expect against a host nation."

Further information

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