Bob Hanning, vice-president of the German Handball Federation (DHB), has not ruled out a separation from national coach Christian Prokop after the disappointing European Championship “We would like to continue with Christian Prokop. I hope that we will not come to a different assessment of the situation,”said Hanning in the ZDF sports studio and announced a detailed analysis.
“We’ll be working this up critically and honestly over the next six weeks,”said Hanning, after the DHB team in Croatia missed out on the declared semi-final goal of the tournament and finished in ninth place. There is nothing to boast about:”Within twelve months, we simply blew up the World Championship with Dagur Sigurdsson and the European Championship with Christian Prokop.”
Hanning has not lost faith in his own strength:”I trust this team and this coach to play a good World Cup at home,”said the managing director of Bundesliga club Füchse Berlin. For this, the DHB will now “talk to the Players’ Council. We will of course talk to the coach team. We’ll see what we can do and what the basic situation is.”
The 49-year-old Hanning does not want to join in the fierce public criticism of the national coach Hanning:”It is the desire to protect Christian Prokop and not to feed the crowd,”said the 49-year-old,”We must also give him the chance to analyse this for himself and perhaps do things differently. Since he’s a very reflective person, I’m sure he’ll draw his own conclusions.”
The predominantly weak performances came unexpectedly for Hanning:”We played great until then. It didn’t indicate anything was wrong. The decision not to nominate Finn Lemke was wrong:” Finn is an absolutely emotional leader. You’d better not leave him at home in a situation like this. The fact that it left its mark on the team is beyond dispute.”
However, Hanning finds the reports on the relationship between coach and team exaggerated:”The overall situation has been very, very much reinterpreted. The German Handball Federation has not been able to establish a broken relationship.”