The world's eight best in action - the quarter-final matches at the Women's Handball World Championship begin today in Dortmund, and Wednesday is reserved for two duels in Rotterdam.
Montenegro is again at the top, and will have the toughest challenge to reach the semifinals - a match against Norway (8:30 p.m.), the current European and Olympic champions, as well as the world vice-champion.
The duel between the "Lionesses" and the Norwegians in the "Westfalenhalle" will be the 13th meeting between these two teams.
Perhaps as expected, the score is convincingly on the side of the Scandinavian national team, which won 10 out of 12 games.
Still, the two triumphs of the "lionesses" were great, but one defeat will also be remembered - in the final of the 2012 Olympic Games, when our country received its first Olympic medal. Perhaps the medal would have been even more brilliant than silver if the Bonaventura sisters had not dispensed justice.
Our national team's first victory came in 2012 in Belgrade when Montenegro won in the unforgettable final of the European Championship (34:31).
After 80 minutes of handball and an unreal game by Milena Raičević (then Knežević), Sonja Barjaktarović, Katarina Bulatović and a friend, our national team then ended the dominance of Norway, which had been the champion of the Old Continent in four tournaments before that.
The second triumph was recorded in March 2021 at the Olympic Games qualifying tournament held in Podgorica.
The "Lionesses" celebrated 28:23, and later (somewhat like Germany at this World Cup) they didn't calculate against Romania, so Norway traveled to Tokyo with them.
It was in the capital of Japan that these two teams played their last match in a major competition (35:23 for Norway), and after that they met in the EHF Cup, and in the summer of 2023 they will also play two friendly matches.
Bonus video:
