Allons enfants de la patrie, le jour de gloire est arrivé!

France won against the Croatian team and the hostile Croatian supporters with 24:19. France is now the Handball World Champion. Vive la France! Well earned with an exciting match!

Poland got the bronze medal with their clear victory over a weary acting Denmark (31:23).

I also updated the final ranking below.

As expected, France and Croatia will meet in this year’s finale of the World Men’s Handball Championship. Denmark and Poland fight for bronze.

Yesterday, France won easily against Denmark: 27:22. And Croatia declassified Poland with 29:23, I guess the success is also partly based on the furious Croatian supporters in the hall. France and Croatia both displayed really nice and for a viewer enjoyable handball playing. I guess the finale will be hot, very hot!

Today the 2009 World Men’s Handball Championship starts. It is hosted by Croatia and will end on the 1st February 2009. So we will get a bit more coverage of handball on the TV as well as on news websites.

My favourite teams are France (current Olympic Champion), Germany (current World Champion), Denmark (current European Champion) and of course Norway. Sadly, I am missing the team of Iceland, which didn’t qualify during the European play-offs.

Well, there will be certainly highly exciting matches and I am certainly looking forward to watch some on TV. Sadly, the German TV broadcaster for all matches with the German team is RTL, which is not available via Zatoo, so I either have to move the TV to my computer room or try and use their web livestream. Some other matches are shown by DSF, which is available via Zatoo on my laptop.

I hope at least a client’s server will stay up during the WC and will not face the same fate as in 2007, when the server crashed due to heavy load and emergency works had to be done throughout the nights.

More webcoverage of the World Championship:

• www.dhb.de
• www.handball-magazin.com
• www.croatia2009.com

So, let’s now hope corruption and doping don’t show their ugly face during the WC.