Handball World Cup: USA vs. Norway - Final Score 25:28

But those ridiculous seven-man attacks we pull off...
It’s just adding ten seconds of wasted time. The player runs out, the goalie comes back in. We take a shot or draw a foul. Then the goalie goes back out and the player heads back in. There's zero benefit to this seventh man—he's basically just waiting for his cue to sub out, and nobody else is actually playing around him anyway. Then we end up with some half-baked shot that their keeper saves easily, and they catch us on the counter against a disorganized defense and a goalie who's still trying to get his footing.

And then Mother Mary just goes full facepalm mode.

rustywalker1 said:It’s like a recurring pattern: when we face a powerhouse like the German national team in the semifinals, we stumble. When we don't play them, we win.
It's just like our matchups against Norway; if they're in the semifinals, we struggle, but if they aren't, we come out on top.

It is quite simply a fact of life.

Looking back at the last seven years, it seems whenever we face anyone in a semifinal, we just can't quite pull it off.

Luke "the saboteur" Stepančić just had to finish what he started back in the first half, so he decided to go for his third penalty just two minutes before the buzzer, leaving us sitting at -1.

I have to get this off my chest: Ajmooo Babić, go shove your "holy" superstar up your ass... 🙂

neonfalcon16 said:Look, I’m not trying to downplay his terrible shooting night, but he basically had to pick up the slack for what Stepančić and Šebetić should have been doing.

Maybe I just phrased that wrong. I guess there's this whole tradition where people say Duvnjak is always a disaster in big games, but honestly? Maybe he's only 50% of the reason. If he's even that much.

Every single, single, absolutely every tournament, people end up complaining that Dule can barely stay on his feet. It’s like, sure, we let them get slaughtered by Germany just so he can play until the very end and all that.

Instead of giving him some rest—like maybe playing him 15 minutes after a game if needed—he just ends up gasping for air in the semifinals because he's totally spent. It happens every single time, I swear.

Honestly, talk about a total gut punch—getting handed a penalty in the final seconds of a championship game? That is just beyond belief! 🙏

Kudos to those gritty Norwegians—they really dug deep. Huge props to their goalie, too, for basically bailing them out of a hole today.

Look, I disagree with wiredseal7—in a spot like that, you don't hand the ball to a guy who just blew a penalty. You risk throwing away a lead we actually held late in the game, and those Norwegians aren't going to miss a gift like that in overtime. We played like absolute amateurs, and honestly, we deserve to get crushed by the Dutch tomorrow. As for the ref? He should be fired on the spot for how badly he handled this match.

Then again, even if we’d moved on, the French would’ve just handed us a lesson in the finals anyway, so I’m not losing sleep over it. This wasn't even the worst heartbreak we've faced in the playoffs—certainly nothing compared to the disaster during the last Olympics.

George Robinson43 said:The last 7 years? Every single time we hit the semifinals against anyone, we just completely choke.

hahahaha, preach. Honestly, my only regret is back in 2005—I think?—when that guy, was it Pajović or Pajević, almost gouged Metličić's eyes out. Man, if that hadn't happened, we could've been stacking gold medals left and right across different championships.

steelharbor9 said:Duvnjak's usual semi-final stats, 3/13 🙏

Hahaha, oh man, just lay it on thick! Why don't you go ahead and pull up the stats for when LeBron James was struggling through those sweeps against the San Antonio Spurs back in 2007? You know, back when he was basically dragging the team along just a tiny bit better than these Duvnjakov numbers we're seeing now!