There is a well-known story about the years that were eaten by locusts, and in the case of Montenegrin handball, everything disappeared in just one month - hope for the Olympic Games, the World Cup, continuity...
Instead of being "eaten by locusts", 2024 should have been one of the years to remember - with the women's national team at the Paris Games, with a new men's ticket for the World Cup.
And all that seemed more than realistic, and in the end, the "lionesses" were left without the Olympic rounds, the "lionesses" without the planet's championship, and what is perhaps the most painful - handball women for the first time after 17 consecutive major competitions will not be part of the big stories , while the handball players missed the opportunity to tie four years in a row in the company of the best selections.
Defeats and failures are an integral part of sports, the problem is that these came from selections that Montenegro used to cope with easily or relatively easily.
After London, Rio de Janeiro and Tokyo, the ladies will not be at the Games in Paris because they were eliminated by Germany and Slovenia in the qualifiers - the first selection returned to the Olympic Games after 16 years, and the second is awaiting its debut at the most important sporting event.
Five years ago, the handball players "destroyed" the Olympic and world champion Denmark, they were 2022 at the 11 European Championship, they beat Croatia and Slovenia there, only to be left without the World Cup in 2025 after losing to Italy - a national team that has not participated in major competitions since 1998. .
After the Olympic qualifiers in Ulm, the coach Bojana Popović somehow announced her retirement from that position, while Vlado Shola immediately after the debacle against Italy, as expected and humanely accepted responsibility and resigned.
However, are the selectors the only ones to blame? It seems they didn't, though.
The blame for the failure is certainly also on the players, but above all on those who decided to place Bojana Popović and Vlada Šola in practically the most important positions in our handball - at the Handball Association of Montenegro headed by Peter Kapisos.
It was during the mandate of the legendary handball player Lovcen and the national team that he was dismissed Kim Rasmussen, the selector who took handball players to the Olympic Games in the competition of Norway and Romania - "evil tongues" would say that Kapisoda "mined" the fact that most of the "lionesses" wanted to see the back of the Danish expert, winner of the Champions League in 2016.
We need to be realistic and emphasize that after the not-so-glamorous games in Tokyo, the selection of the once best handball player on the planet brought a result, and a big one when the bronze medal arrived from the European Championship in 2022, but also that it all ended ingloriously - especially in the case Milena Raičević and finally, the most important fact that for the first time since Beijing 2008, the "lioness" will not be at the Olympic Games.
Likewise, RSCG and Kapisoda gambled with the decision to hand over the most talented generation of the men's national team at a very delicate moment, when it had already begun to slowly decline during the 2023 World Cup, to Vlad Šola - an expert who, before coming to Montenegro, had the only serious job in Zagreb . And he stayed there for only four months.
If the good performances at the recent European Championship managed to hide the reality, the barrage duels with Italy showed that the coach, who is undoubtedly a goalkeeping legend, was a total failure of the Handball Association.
Šola is gone, Bojana is close to it, and it's time for the leading people of RSCG to take responsibility - to put proven names in the selectors' positions or leave it to someone who will do everything with more feeling, knowledge and authority.
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