From 22-29 April the Mediterranean Handball Confederation’s (MHC) Women’s Mediterranean Handball Championship will be held in the northern Montenegrin town of Zabljak with seven teams fighting it out for the title.
The championship is open to teams featuring players born in 2002 onwards with hosts Montenegro (MNE) along with France (FRA), Italy (ITA), Tunisia (TUN), Slovenia (SLO), Turkey (TUR) and invited team Romania (ROU) competing against each other for regional success.
The tournament will start with a Preliminary Round where all teams play each other once in a league format. The Placement Round then follows with the team who finished top of the Preliminary Round league qualifying directly to the semi-finals, with the other three semi-finals made up of the winners of the league positions 2nd vs 7th, 3rd vs 6th and 4th vs 5th.
The losing teams in the Placement Round will play in the 5-7 Placement Round while the semi-finals will feature the winners of the Preliminary Round against the winners of the 4th/5th match and the winners of the other two placement matches facing off to determine the other finalists.
In the Mediterranean Handball Confederation games are different to the normal ‘Olympic’ handball rules with a game duration of 45 minutes consisting of three 15-minute periods (except for the final which is 3 x 20 minutes).
Whichever team wins the respective period gets a point, a draw equals 0.5 points for each team and the overall winner of the match gets two points, a draw is one point each. The final scoring of each match should add up to five points. So, if a team wins all three periods, and therefore the game, it is 1+1+1+2 = 5 points.
Zabljak will be the 13th edition of the championship which follows on from last year’s event, held in the north-eastern Tunisian coastal town of Nabeul and won by Romania.
The first Women’s Mediterranean Handball Championship took place in Italy in 2004 then, MNE (2006), FRA (2007), TUR (2008), ITA (2009), CRO (2010), ITA (2011), ISR (2012), MNE (2013), TUN (2015), MNE (2016) and TUN (2017).
The championships are governed by the Mediterranean Handball Confederation, which was formed back in June 1999 in Cairo, Egypt, originally as the Mediterranean Handball Association, and with IHF President Dr Hassan Moustafa as their founding President. Original member countries included ALG, CYP, EGY, GRE, ITA, LBA, MAR, POR, SYR, TUN, TUR and the former Yugoslavia. In February 2003 the association changed to a confederation and an Executive Committee was formed.