Croatian coach Hrvoje Horvat said that his team did not enter the match with Montenegro arrogantly or underestimated the rival, and, as described by the Croatian media, he did not look too disappointed after the high defeat of 32:26, after which the "cowboys" only had a theoretical chance to they can reach the semi-finals of the Euro in Budapest.
"We opened quite nervously, we didn't manage to play our game, until the end, we wanted to break the Montenegrins who played patiently in five or ten minutes. This was followed by several good defenses by their goalkeeper. We started to hit something in the second half, but it didn't work no matter what we tried. A well-deserved victory for Montenegro," Horvat told RTL.
He said that we got nervous after a few misses.
"We shouldn't have paid attention to the fact that we were losing, we agreed not to look at the scoreboard because we have a lot of young players who look at it wrongly. Montenegro has a lot of experienced players for the chess game that was needed today," says Horvat, emphasizing:
"We didn't underestimate Montenegro, we knew what qualities they have. Maybe we had too much desire to settle the match early".
Croatia remained at zero after the first match of the 2nd phase.
"We knew after the defeat against France that we were entering the knockout phase and that each subsequent defeat would take us very far from the fight for a medal. Now we depend on other results and that something coincides with us, but the primary thing now is for us to pull together and not look like this nervous than to go back to looking like we did in the first phase," concluded Hrvoje Horvat.
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