Cav's Place

While there have been a few years since something truly great, I was used to the Romanian women’s handball teams obtaining much better results than Romanians usually tend to obtain in sports, and I was actually expecting them to really push this season, seeing as, at least as far as I know, the Romanian Women’s Handball National League attracts and keeps so many great players by offering the highest salaries in the world, yet many teams are funded by local authorities and the new regulations aimed at reducing the deficit will drastically limit the available funds, so we may be looking at a collapse as of next year.
However, what’s been going on so far in the Champions’ League is quite disappointing, especially when it comes to CSM Bucuresti. Those budget restrictions will hit them hard, Cristina Neagu won’t be playing that much longer, and I’d have also expected them to want to avenge what happened last season, when they were expected to obtain a great result and seemed to confirm that good form up to the end of the group phase, when they somehow “managed” to lose first place, setting themselves up for a tougher duel in the quarter-finals, which they lost. Instead, however, while expert commentators were so far saying that they shouldn’t finish lower than third in that group even if they’d try, so the question seemed to only be whether they’ll be among the top two and go straight to the quarter-finals again, at this point they definitely seem to “manage” to be lower than third, losing three of the five matches played so far. And what’s worse is that they’re not playing like a team that is capable of great results, but more like one in crisis, the players making way too many mistakes and bad decisions and rushing far too much and in inappropriate moments.
And it’s not like Rapid is likely to do what CSM doesn’t. That amazing second match against Krim from last season was a really nice surprise, winning by the exact score needed to advance when any sort of hopes of such a result would have seemed entirely unreasonable before the match, so both teams reached the quarter-finals, but this season they seem to have just collapsed, doing poorly in the championship as well, so just making it past the group stage would be a good enough result, with no expectations of having any sort of chance against one of the clearly better teams that they’ll then face, even if that would end up being CSM… Though at least that would ensure that one of them will once again be in the quarter-finals, which is otherwise unlikely, considering the powerful teams that are in Rapid’s group and which are therefore CSM’s other potential opponents in the at this point very probable scenario that they won’t manage to grab one of the first two places and once again skip straight to the quarter-finals.