Estonian men's handball team beats Ukraine in world championship qualifier first leg

The Estonian national men's handball team prevailed over Ukraine in the first leg of their 2025 IHF World Men's Handball Championship qualifier, winning 32:29 Wednesday.
The team started their qualifying campaign in November, doing the double over Latvia, home and away.
The second match involves the current opponent, Ukraine, with the away leg in this case to be played in Lithuania on Saturday.
Ukraine are two-time world championship finalists, and reached the European championships in 2020 and 2022, though overall they have won only two out of 29 games at the European finals.
Ahead of Wednesday's encounter, Estonia's head coach Martin Noodla said Ukraine can send the bigger, taller and younger men to the court, although their composition had changed compared with the previous game and Estonia was likely caught out by this to some extent.
"In order to achieve success, we have to play a faster game than our opponent, because we can't somehow quickly grow bigger so," he told ERR's Sport portal Monday.
Meanwhile, team captain Karl Roosna said of the Ukrainians that they are: "Quite a young team, with five-six-seven principal players who have been there in the past, plus they also have players who play in some tough leagues, with tough clubs."
On the day, player Dener Jaanimaa said that the team's lack of time together was evident on court, but "These things came up, and we fought until the end and triumphed."
Goaltender Rasmus Ots, who pulled off 12 saves, said: "Compared with Latvia, the opponent was a mite stronger, plus also considering that we had a relatively small amount of pre-match intel, this makes it a rather sweet victory."
"Now that we've seen them, we know who we're up against, we can definitely prepare ourselves better for the next game."
The match started with the Estonian team dictating the pace in front of a home crowd, but the Ukrainians always found an answer to Estonians' goals.
At halftime, the score was 18:16, while a physical second half during which one Estonian player, Hendrik Varul, was red carded, nonetheless resulted in a 32:29 win for Estonia.
Jaanimaa was top scorer with 11 goals.
As noted Estonia and Ukraine play the second leg on Saturday in Lithuania. The overall winner will next place Iceland for a spot in next year's world championship finals taking place in Croatia, Denmark and Norway.
--
Follow ERR News on Facebook and Twitter and never miss an update!
Editor: Andrew Whyte
Source: ERR Sport