“It kind of felt like a revenge, in a way.”
This is how centre back Luc Steins described his feeling at the final buzzer of Paris Saint-Germain Handball’s quarter-final against THW Kiel. The 63:59 aggregate win earned the French side its ticket to the EHF FINAL4 2021, this weekend in Cologne.
“I just thought: ‘This is it. We have done it.’ I was so happy. We played the almost perfect game against Kiel at home. It was a lot of hard work, but it got us through there.”
Of course, it was no revenge in the true sense of the word, but Steins still had clearly on his mind what happened to him just before the 2020 edition of the EHF FINAL4 last December.
On the morning of the semi-final against Barça, the Dutch international tested positive for Covid-19 and was ruled out of what would have been his first EHF FINAL4.
“I won’t say it was a motivation during the second part of the season, but maybe subconsciously, it gave me a boost,” Steins said.
“We had everything prepared and all of sudden, everything went to the bin. It took me a couple of days to recover from this disappointment.”