Still want to see some reasonably top-level handball in the narrow window between the end of the Olympics and the start of the club season?  Well, cast your internet feed in the direction of Montenegro as the official site of the IHF Women’s Youth World Championship will be live-streaming the games from this year’s competition which starts today.

There have been three iterations of this tournament so far and, remarkably, the nine medals available in that time have been won by eight different countries with only Denmark (winners in 2006, bronze in 2008) claiming two.  The current holders are Sweden whereas France have lost in the bronze medal match in every single edition of the tournament.

Twenty countries are competing this time around beginning with a round-robin of four groups of five with the top two in each progressing to the quarter finals.  Day 1 sees eight matches, most of which are probably foregone conclusions (e.g. Netherlands are 1/5000 to beat Paraguay) but the match between Portugal and Angola (1500 BST) looks intriguing.  As for who will win the tournament I’m going for the hosts who seem to have a slightly easier group than some other big-name countries and will then fly to the final inspired by the exploits of their senior counterparts in London.

And France will lose the bronze medal match as that’s the law in these championships.

The official page with link to live stream is here.

And the wiki page with the fixtures laid our nicely is here.