Results:
A list of medalists of The Men’s & Women’s European Team Champinships is a short one. Frankly – it cannot be shorter, there were always the same teams on the podium. The reason is simple – it’s only the third time this tournament had this formula.
Before 2006 men and women played on one team. There were two singles matches, two doubles, and one mixed doubles match. The points were added up, and the champion was declared. The idea of spliting the men’s and women’s competiton was welcomed by everyody. The most important countries on the badminton map of the world had nothing against it – the opportunity of winning two medals instead of one was obviously intersting. It was almost equally intresting to other countries – the national teams that had only two or three high level players were given a chance of winning a european championship medal; that wasn’t possible with the former formula.
Two different podiums were set up for men and women during the European Championships in Thesaloniki, Greece in 2006. The first result was a bit of a shock – Denrmark, one of the Europe’s best badminton teams didn’t win a medal in the competition, losing the women’s bronze medal match to Germany. Netherland won the final match against Great Britain, becoming the first Women’s European Champion.
Two years later in Almere, the Dutch team didn’t manage to defend the title. The Denmark national team was gunning for the gold from day one, giving away only two points – to Germans in the semi final and to the hosts in the final match.
The Germans took the bronze. Almost nothing altered in the Men’s competition after the formula change. In the first tournament Denmark won defeating German and British national teams. No one se emed to be surprised with this result, which doesn’t mean that evereyone was sattisfied. Definitely not the Poles, who were defeated in the quarterfinal by Germany 2:3 and lost their chance for a medal.
The Polish national team came back from Almere with mixed emotions. In the quarterfinal Poland won against Netherlands 3:2, which meant progress but who would be sattisfied with being fourth? In the next matches Poles lost 0:3 to Great Britain and 1:3 to Germany.
That was a brief history of greek and dutch tournaments. Whtat will we see in Poland? You don’t need to divine from the stars to find out that the turnout might be quite similar this time. Let’s take a look at the european rankings.
Three players from Denmark on the top of the singles list. Between them and the fourth one we’ve got two Dutch and English players and Przemyslaw Wacha from Poland. Three points in singles means a won match, so You can do the math. Even so – two top pairs from the doubles ranking come from Denmark, next one from Great Britain followed by Michal Logosz and Robert Mateusiak from Poland.
As we can see this is still the same circle of five national teams. One of them will not be present in the semi finals. We may expect that a team from group B will be one of them. Poland and Great Britain are present in this group, so to find out – we will have to wait untill February 18th. The draw was not too lucky for the Poles, it was Nadia Kostiuczyk and Robert Mateusiak’s fault – they were invited to the Badminton Europe headquarters for the drawing ceremony…
