In the seventh round of the Champions League, DVSC SCHAEFFLER will play away against CSM Bucharest. The Romanian team, full of top players, has already won the BL once. This year, their goal is at least to reach the Final Four.

Photo: EHF

DVSC SCHAEFFLER travels to Bucharest on Friday, and will play its next Champions League match at the home of CSM Bucharest on Saturday at 6 p.m. Our team has played away twice so far. The match against Győr didn’t really have any surprises, but against Odense we played a very close match, but in the end the hosts won with three goals. At home, however, our record is excellent. Zoltán Szilágyi’s team won three out of four matches, of which the latest success against Brest is considered a huge feat. CSM Bucharest won the Romanian championship last year, this season, like Loki, they have scored six points in the CL so far, defeating Odense at home and Buducsnost and Savehof away.

This will be the first time that the two teams meet, which is not so surprising in light of the fact that CSM was founded in 2007 and, with one exception, only appeared in the Champions League. In 2011, it entered the European Cup for the first time, when it reached the top 16 in the EHF Cup. The Champions League debut turned out to be truly memorable: in their first CL season, they conquered the most prestigious European cup, defeating Győr in the final! Our current opponent has been in the CL continuously since 2015, reaching the Final Four in each of its first three seasons, but failed to repeat the first place it achieved in the first year (won a bronze medal two times). In recent years, they failed to reach the top four, and three times the quarter-finals were the last stop for the Romanians. CSM plays its home matches in the 5,300-seat Polyvalent Hall, built in 1974.

The head coach of CSM Bucharest is 41-year-old Adrian Vasile, who previously also managed the Romanian national team in parallel from 2021 to 2022. CSM has no shortage of big names, Laura Glauser, the French national team who previously also played in Győr, her relay partners are the Norwegian national team player, Marie Skurtveit Davidsen, and Swedish Evelina Eriksson. Unsurprisingly, the top scorer is the Romanian world class, Cristina Neagu, who may be familiar with DVSC, as she played against us as a youngster in 2008, with Corona Brasov, and scored 12 goals in the two meetings. It is interesting that Dóra Hornyák, who was only 16 years old at the time, also played in that match. She also scored four goals in the away match, but this time she cannot play due to a knee injury. Need to pay close attention to the Norwegian national team’s linebacker, Vilde Mortensen Ingstad, who has already scored 22 goals this year, but the two backs, Emilie Arntzen and Monika Kobylinska, are also producing well. CSM is a truly international team, they have a total of twelve foreign players, including Norwegian, Danish and even Spanish national team players.