“We won the lottery! “… How the Blues put their profusion of lefties to good use

Does the ketchup effect speak to you? We’ve all been there once: you tap, tap, tap the ass of a ketchup bottle but nothing comes out, until – Splatch! – there is enough to dip the equivalent of the daily consumption of fries in Belgium on your plate. Well that’s what the French handball team is currently going through, which faces Germany in the quarter-finals of the World Cup on Wednesday, with left-handers.

Long short of this rare commodity in high-level handball – since, ideally, it takes at least two to hold the positions of right winger and right side, i.e. 30% of the team, while left-handed people only represent 10 to 13% of the world’s population – the Blues are now rolling in gold from this point of view. Gone are the days when Claude Onesta, in a galley of left-handers who hold the road, had to ask the right-hander Jérôme Fernandez to help out at the right-back position.

“It’s a great wealth that other nations envy us,” agrees the former captain of the Experts. With Nedim Remili, Dika Mem, Melvin Richardson, Valentin Porte and Yanis Lenne, the Blues are armed like no one in this 2023 World Cup. With hindsight, Philippe Bana would almost laugh about it.

“It’s a crazy story because for a very long time we had talented left-handers and then it dried up little by little, so much so that in the early 2000s, at the Sydney Olympics, we is anxious about not having good left-handers. We were very worried because we had learned to play with them, there was an admission of powerlessness. And then finally they all suddenly came back at a time when we were no longer expecting them. Overnight, it started raining left-handers on French handball! »

In search of the lost left-hander

How to explain this? For his part, the president of the FFH prefers to play it “humble” by speaking of a “gift from heaven”. “You shouldn’t see it as something very organized,” he explains. In the detection policies put in place, there is a large part of chance and chance. There, we won the lottery! “. Nevertheless, the federal attention also played in this hunt for lefties. Each time a club had a good one among its young people, it made sure to grab it by the colback and bring the info up.

“We are like gold diggers, explains Philippe Bana. We don’t have the right to be wrong or to miss the rare pearl. Today, whether as goalkeeper or right-back, everyone is digging for the nugget. My daughter is 7 years old, she arrived in her club a year ago and everyone looked at her saying ‘oh she’s big’, but nothing more. And at one point she said ‘I’m left-handed’, and then everyone came to tell her ‘come on, come to our house!’. Indeed, this thing exists. »

It is moreover this particularism that made Dika Mem try his luck, he who was absolutely not predestined to make a career. “If I had been right-handed, I probably wouldn’t have played handball,” he told AFP in 2017. “I started because I was told that left-handers were in demand and that I could play in the departmental selection. “If the phenomenon is not new either, most of the left-handers of the France team already having a little bottle in Blue, it was still necessary to adapt to this profusion and think about how to properly ‘utilize. Thus, instead of putting them all in competition for the positions of full-back and right winger, “which would have been a huge waste” according to Olivier Krumbholz, the coach of the French women’s team, France made sure to play on the complementarity of profiles and shake up the codes of handball which has always leaned to the left.

“We ended up with such a profusion of left-handers that we ended up watering the other positions for which they were not predestined, such as that of playmaker, where Nedim Remili and Melvin Richardson play today, something that ‘we had never seen handball in half a century, explains Bana. It creates new opportunities from a tactical point of view and it poses a lot of problems for the opponents. »

Why ? “Because 98 times out of 100, in top-level handball, the centre-half is right-handed. I let you imagine the complexity for the defenses of suddenly having to adapt against a left-hander, ”adds Olivier Krumbholz. Jérôme Fernandez deciphers: “When you are a central defender like Luka Karabatic or Ludovic Fabregas and you are used to defending against right-handers in the position of center half, you have automatisms which are created with your defensive pair, and they are upset when you have to defend on a southpaw. The ball trajectories are not the same, nor are the effects and passing lines, it’s not easy to adapt to that. »

Left-handers, “personalities apart” for Krumbholz

If this rare species is much more represented (and therefore pampered) in high-level sport than in the general population according to different studies, due, among other things, to a slightly faster reaction time than right-handed people when it comes to visual and spatial information, left-handed people and left-handed people, conversely, have never had it easy in company. Even in the linguistics of certain countries, where the word “left” is often pejorative. In French, for example, it is synonymous with clumsy, awkward, unbalanced. And when you’re in a bad mood, as if by chance, how did you get up, huh? In the past, at school, they were required to force themselves to write with their right hand or risk trying out the cane.

Even if times have changed, fortunately, the life course of left-handers makes them special athletes according to Olivier Krumbholz: “Left-handers are often rather special players in a group, they are often special personalities. It is due to their atypical career, in handball but also in everyday life. When you are left-handed in life, it is not without consequences. There are plenty of utensils that you find difficult to use, for example. Society is still organized for right-handed people, and this atypical course often gives birth to atypical personalities. Personalities with which the France team abounds, to the delight of coach Guillaume Gille. And the misfortune of the opposing coaches.

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