A bad evening for the Cavigal handball players. Facing Nîmes, the team from Nice missed their meeting (32-20).
There are evenings like that. Riding a positive wave, the Cavigal handball players had a date in Gard’s territory this Saturday. With four consecutive victories, the players from the Alpes-Maritimes were largely favored in this match against the 9th in pool 4 of the National. Yet nothing went as planned.
The match struggled to get going. Solid in their respective goals, both goalkeepers kept a clean sheet for more than three minutes. Nîmes eventually scored first. It took an additional three minutes before Nice also opened their scoring. Despite a very effective Maxime Aicardi at the start of the match, the players from Nice quickly fell behind. Although at the fifteen-minute mark nothing was decided yet, things quickly turned in favor of the locals. This was due to the realism of the Nîmes team. Cavigal lost balls and gave their opponents an eight-goal lead that evening.
For while the realism of the Gard team was undeniable, the clumsiness of the players from Nice was equally evident. As proof, only Nils Jean-Zephirin finished the match with just over 50% shooting success. And it wasn’t Eden Speno’s performance (10 saves in the second half) that was enough to get the Cavigal players back into the match. Worse, the players from the Alpes-Maritimes saw the gap widen towards the end of the match, probably realizing there was nothing to be done that night.
Nîmes eventually triumphed (32-20) and pushed Cavigal down one position in the rankings. The team from Nice fell to 4th place but remain within striking distance of the top spots with only a two-point deficit. However, they must not falter next week. Cavigal will host AS Lyon at the Pasteur gymnasium on Saturday at 8:30 PM.
