I thought I’d resurrect the site in honour of the fact that there’s a top-drawer international tournament coming up and if you can’t get excited about that then what can you get excited by?

The 21st Women’s Handball World Championships starts this evening at 5pm UK time with the host nation (that’s Serbia) taking on Japan.  Anything other than a mahoosive win for the home team will be a shock.  Japan finished third at the Asian Championships to qualify and didn’t disgrace themselves in the 2011 World Championship (Denmark required extra time to put them out at the quarter final stage) and whilst the Serbs, surprisingly, don’t have a great World Championship pedigree they will hope to ride the same momentum they had during Euro 2012 which was also held in Serbia where they reached the semi finals.

Serbia v Japan is the only match today.  Everyone else plays tomorrow in what some people might call a handball overload.  Those people are wrong.

The full fixture list for the opening matches on 7 December is below, my helpful predictions are in brackets.  All times are UK.

Group A:
1.45pm Montenegro v South Korea (The European champions should win fairly comfortably but Korea aren’t too shabby and it should be a good game.)
4pm France v DR Congo (The French could play their third string for the whole match and win at a canter.  This could be ugly.)
6.15pm Netherlands v Dominican Republic (The Dutch never seem to be quite as good as I expect them to be but should still win here against the Americas’ third best team.)

Group B:
5pm Brazil v Algeria (I’m looking forward to this one.  Both teams will have marked this as must win)
7.15pm Denmark v China (China have never finished higher than 12th in a World Championship.  Denmark will win.)

Group C:
2.45pm Angola v Argentina (See Brazil v Algeria except I expect this to be even better.)
5pm Poland v Paraguay (Poland to win.  Not much else to say.)
7.15pm Norway v Spain (It’s a shame that there’s so little jeopardy in the early stages.  This really should be a high quality contest though.  Norway lost their first match in 2011 (to Germany) but you’d expect them to win today.)

Group D:
1.45pm Hungary v Czech Republic (Hungary are really quite good, the Czech Republic less so.)
4pm Germany v Australia (As a proud Englishman I am always pleased to see Australia lose.  And they will lose here.  By a lot.)
6.15pm Romania v Tunisia (Romania’s star has somewhat sunk in handball terms but they should still win games like this one.)

Four teams from each group go into the Last 16 which is then a straightforward knock out to the final.  The Round of 16 is played 15/16 December and the final is on the 22nd.  Expect full venues for when the Serbs are around, less full ones for when they are not.

There is an official IHF page where you can watch the tournament.  It’ll cost you (and I’m not making this up) £30.  Because that’s how you spread handball.  You wouldn’t want to, I don’t know, follow the example of the European Handball Federation (and others) and have live matches stream over YouTube or ehftv so anyone not already converted can see the action firsthand.  That would be silly.  But, anyway, if you don’t want to pay £30 you can deposit £1 in a Bet365 account and they appear to have every match available on their livestreaming although the quality will be less.  I have looked on the Eurosport/Premier pages but can’t see any coverage there yet.

To get you in the mood for the tournament why not watch the bizarre teaser video:

Or, to actually get you in the mood, how about reliving the final few minutes of the epic European final where Montenegro beat Norway.  Anything like this between now and the 22nd and we’ll all be well-pleased: