Five reasons for the power shift in women’s handball in Scandinavia

Ahead of the season, not many people would probably have expected the coming Sunday’s match between Team Esbjerg and Larvik to be a meeting between top and bottom in Group D of the Women’s EHF Champions League – and definitely not with Larvik as the team on the bottom with zero points. Still, this is the case before the Scandinavian derby in Esbjerg Sunday afternoon. Esbjerg are on top with four points after their two matches, while Larvik have got an unusually poor start to the group matches with two defeats. The power balance in women’s handball in Scandinavia seems to have tipped, maybe only temporarily, maybe permanently. During the past six years – ever since Danish Viborg HK won the Women’s Champions League for the third time in 2010 – Larvik have been the dominating women’s club in Scandinavia. In 2011, they won the Champions League, and since then, the Norwegian club has not done any worse than the quarter-final. So far, Larvik’s dominance seems to have been broken by Team Esbjerg. There are five reasons for this change. Three of them relate to Esbjerg, two to Larvik. 1. Esbjerg’s coach Since 2011, Lars Frederiksen has been head coach in Team Esbjerg, and it had five years of almost uninterrupted progress and development in the team. This spring, he performed his masterpiece so far by taking the team to its first Danish championship in history, and this season, he has led his team to an impressive debut in the Champions League group matches with a 35:25 win at home against RK Krim Mercator and a 25:20 away victory against IK Sävehof. From his experience as a player as well as a coach, 46-year-old Frederiksen knows what it is all about. As an uncompromising defender in KIF Kolding, he …

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