“The Controversial Final: Injury and Accusations in Czech Handball Championship”

It was the 13th minute of the fourth final match in Karviná, with the score 5:5 in the home attack, Dominik Solák finished with signaled passivity, and defender Jan Chmelík unsparingly pulled him to the ground in a jump from behind. The result was an uncontrolled fall to the ground, a broken collarbone, which the Karvin representative clutch completely broke a few minutes later during a shot.

That was the end of the final for Solák. Just like for Chmelík, who saw a red and blue card for a hard tackle, which means automatic disciplinary proceedings. And the injury of the key player Baník really put a strain on coach Michal Brůna.

“I congratulate Pilsen on a good performance. The only blemish on this match was a liquidating foul by Chmelík on the league’s best player, Dominik Solák. I have always praised him for his toughness, but also for his fairness. I have never seen the foul he committed on Solák in a jump. If it’s true that he’s retiring, it looks pretty suspicious. It looks like he sacrificed himself for Solák and he doesn’t have to do anything about the blue card, because it was his last match,” claimed Brůna, who was already a known stormtrooper even as a player, on the club’s website the day after the match.

The Pilsen winger apologized for his intervention. “I would like to return him back, but unfortunately that is no longer possible. My goal was certainly not to foul outside the rules. I wish Dominic a speedy recovery! I’m also sorry that coach Brůna is pushing the construct about my sacrifice,” Chmelík said on Pilsen’s website the day after the match.

Only five days after the end of the final series, the Pilsen club also commented on the whole situation, strongly objecting to Brůn. “The behavior described by coach Brůna is in no way compatible with the philosophy that our club promotes, nor with any definition of sport as such. None of the players ever had the task of attacking an opponent’s player in order to injure him, this type of thinking is completely foreign to us,” said the Czech champion.

Talent also hit back, bringing up a two-year-old incident that was known in handball circles but never aired publicly by the clubs. “On the contrary, coach Brůn contacted our player Milan Škvařil via messages on the Facebook Messenger platform during the 2020/2021 final series and threatened him with physical liquidation,” the Pilsen team continued in the statement, adding quotes from the Karvina coach.

“I’ll send someone to grab your arm from behind. “Unfortunately, I don’t have anyone as strong as you from the front,” Brůna allegedly wrote to Milan Škvařil, the mainstay of Talent at the time, who later helped West Bohemia to the title. Petr Štochl directly with coach Brůna and nowhere did they publicly ventilate the incident,” Plzeň added on her website.