Mathieu Grébille: 'Only ourselves to blame'

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On Thursday evening, Paris Saint-Germain Handball travelled to Flensburg for their EHF Champions League Matchday 13 fixture. After a tough first half (19-10), Les Rouge et Bleu fought back but fell agonisingly short (28-27). Raul Gonzalez, Viran Morros and Mathieu Grébille gave is their thoughts on the match.

Raul Gonzalez (Paris Saint-Germain Handball coach):
"We had a chance to top the group, but we let it go... We started very badly, both in attack and defence. It's good to be good against Kielce (37-26), but we can't play like this two days later. We didn't have a lot of time to prepare for the match, so we had to be more focused than usual. We weren't. It's our fault... We'll play on Tuesday (against Elverum) and Thursday (against Szeged) and we'll have to win. But we will first concentrate on Istres."

Viran Morros (Paris Saint-Germain Handball left-back):
"The first half was very bad... We can't start a match they we did we did today. If we want to achieve great things, we have to play as we did in the second half, with intensity and aggressiveness. We had the opportunity to come back, but we didn't succeed... We were behind the whole game so it was complicated. We have a great team and good players, but we lacked the intensity. In the Champions League, it's difficult to make up such a gap. Congratulations to Flensburg, who are a great team. There are still a lot of matches and great things to achieve this season. We have to keep working and fix our mistakes."

Mathieu Grébille (Paris Saint-Germain Handball left-winger):
"We're all disappointed because we didn't measure up over 60 minutes. We had too many issues shooting on goal and we blew our first half. But we reacted well. As soon as we increased our aggressiveness in defence, Flensburg started to hesitate. That put us mentally back in the game. We showed another face and almost came back, but against this kind of team it's very complicated to come back after being behind by nine goals. We had the opportunities to come back, so we can only have ourselves to blame. We have to be strong from the beginning of the game. We have to be able to bounce back after this loss."

(Credits: J. Azouze/PSG)