A colleague of mine has started his own blog (in German), where he writes about Handball, Australia and whatever comes to his mind. It’s fun to read, so if you can read (and understand) German, head to tok’n’web. Enjoy!

So, the World Championship 2009 has started… first, a big disappointment: the livestream of RTL does not work. My guess is RTL miscalculated the webtraffic such a livestream creates and so the livestreaming server is heavily overloaded. Obviously it cannot cope with the onslaught of wild webbased German handball team supporters… Well, I don’t want to nitpick, I have also monitored a client’s website over the weekend to see what impact such an event has (learning from experiences during the World Championship 2007), but so far, everything is running fine (knock on wood!).

Secondly, the matches of the German team have been interesting and exciting. It’s not the same team which was winning the WC in 2007, but nevertheless it was nice to see. I agree, the match against Russia could have been better and it ended in a remis 26:26, but you certainly saw an increase in performance against a strong Tunesian team yesterday. Germany won 26:24.

How did the other teams? Norway, Denmark (well, a bit too close vs. Serbia), Sweden and Spain got a furious start so far. It’s still too early to predict the Group I and II, but if the current ranking from the preliminary round will not change, we end up with the following:

Group I (1st to 3rd of Group A + B)

• Slovakia
• Spain
• Hungary
• Sweden
• France
• Croatia

Group II (1st to 3rd of Group C + D)

• Poland
• Norway
• Germany
• Denmark
• Macedonia
• Serbia

Well, Egypt is also in Group D… and with the current head of the IHF being from Egypt, it wouldn’t surprise me if Egypt will get into Group II (or even get into the semifinals…).