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The results prior to the 2022 European Youth Championship in Portugal, of the 2004-05 generation, were already so outstanding that the technical management of the Spanish Federation was optimistic about the result that the boys were going to achieve: they won the championship. “A couple of weeks before, the technicians didn’t see it so clearly,” recalled Álex Mozas, Torrelavega coach and Javier Fernández’s assistant. Young wild boar in the selection. A year later, with three changes compared to the 2022 team, this summer, at the Youth World Cup in Croatia, another gold, the first for Spain, which had fallen in two finals.
Although these players were already spoken of internally as the golden generation of Spanish handball, with their dominance in the two most important consecutive events on the international calendar, the value of the team skyrocketed. “The thing is We have stopped looking up to the Nordics, to the Germans, and now they are the ones who are physically lesser; I don’t think it has happened before that Spain has so many centimeters, with ends of almost two meters (Barrufet 1.97 and Guijarro 1.98), with large pivots, with the usual mobility,” he points out. Young wild boarformer player from La Mancha, based in Galicia who, in addition to being on the technical team of the Spanish Federation, directs Cisne de Pontevedra in the Silver Division.
Jordi Ribera, the coach of the absolute Hispanics and director of the men’s area, assures that now they ask him in other countries “how you have done them”, and in part they are right, Ribera himself admits “because with this generation Spain has stopped being a team of short gamers, to continue being gamers but also tall and physically well-endowed.” “In Spain we have always had good players, who understood handball, but in many cases they lost due to lack of physical condition. We have been tracking boys for a while, who do not stand out, because in general the tall ones evolve later. We have been finding them and they have been coming to the CAR concentrations in Granada,” says Ribera, and gives the example of Jokin Aja, “that the first time he spent a week in those concentrations he could not complete it.”
Aja was then a “second-year junior”, who played on an Eibar team, without many pretensions. “In Granada I suffered back pain, perhaps because those training sessions were too intense for me,” Now remember the Barça pivot on loan to Torrelavega. The Federation put up with that 2.06 meter young man who was not attracted to basketball, prepared a specific work plan for him, and a few months later the Barça club took him to Barcelona. Now Jokin is at “2.08 or 2.09 meters, it depends where they measure you and at what time”, and he plays for Torrelavega because Barça is confident in their chances of recovering him in a couple of years trained in a professional team more than in the Barça youth team itself.
“My advantage now is that Eibar is not far away, and my family comes to see me at home games,” says the pivot. Jokin’s father is Mikel Aja, who at one time also played as a center for Arrate; His daughter, four years older than Jokin, is also a center in Eibar. In this generation there are many sagas. Ian is the son of David Barrufet (the second player with the most Spanish caps); Alejandro Pisonero’s father (1.87) is the coach of Valladolid that as a player he was a quality pivot in the late nineties; Óscar Grau (1.88), who was not in the World Cup due to a meniscus injury, follows in the footsteps of his father, who, apart from his career as a sports manager, has his shirt hanging in the Palau for his outstanding role at Barça; and then The Cikusa, whose father played as a foreigner in the Spanish teams, settled in Girona, and Petar (1.93) and Djordje (1.95) were born there, the youngest of the generation, and who turn 18 on the 8th. December.
Precisely, the twins have been the first to debut in the senior team and are the second youngest in Spanish history to reach that height without even being 18 years old (Quico López Balcells has held that record for a few months, since the sixties), hence this is the generation of the Cikusa. “For us it is a pride and an encouragement that the two have already made their debut; “Several of us watched his games together in Norway, and it was very exciting,” comments Víctor Romero (1.94), pivot for Granollers already in the Asobal League, and the captain of the youth teams in both the European Championship and the World Cup.
“The job of a captain is to be a kind of extension of the coach in the locker room, but it doesn’t take much, because there is a very good vibe between everyone, we stay in contact all year, we talk to each other and we care about each other,” explains this pivot who was chosen as the best in his position in the World Cup and who assures that he learns from what a captain is “in Granollers, where that position is held by Antonio García, a general, due to seniority and knowledge; “He is always watching.”
The debut of the Cikusa under Ribera in the senior team is the culmination of these youth players before the end of 2023. “Sometimes you have to have a little luck, and in the case of Petar he has found it because in the situation Barça’s current Carlos Ortega counts on him more than imaginable, but Petar is an extraordinary talent,” says Mozas.
“Petar always gives us incredible things in training; I was sure that with the National Team he was not going to give up even if he was a 17-year-old boy, and look, he left us a hip goal from eight or nine meters that slipped into the corner, to get up,” explains Javier Fernández, who has a theory about the success of this group: “Yes, the Cikusa brothers are magnificent, they already play in the Barça first team, but they did not win any individual prize in the World Championship. This team is a block, with most of the players playing quality minutes in the Asobal. If you review the matches you can see that in many of those matches we were tied but we reached the final part and it was seen that we won, because we were fresh, it had been rotated; “The rivals arriving to keep up with our pace were exhausted.”
“This team is a block, with most of the players playing quality minutes in the Asobal”
Javier Fernandez
Fernández, who will continue with this group in the junior stage, worked with 29 players during the months prior to the European Championship, to which he attended with 16 players. To prepare for the World Cup he maintained the block of 29, to which he added six more players, and from which some components fell due to injury, and in the end he led 14 of the champions in Portugal plus another three to gold in Croatia: Álvaro Pérez ( 1.96), Pol Amores (1.87), Ian Barrufet, Pablo Guijarro, Xavier González (1.82), Ferrán Castillo (1.88), Álex Pisonero, Petar and Djordje Cikusa, Pablo Herrero (1.93) , Ezequiel Conde (2.03), Josu Arzoz (1.88), Víctor Romero and Jokin Aja are the ones who have the double, plus Jorge Barroso (1.80), Jorge Ramírez (1.84) and Óscar Grau (1 .88) has the European gold, and Alberto Delgado (1.80), Carlos Ocaña (1.90) and José María Fernández-Martos (1.88) the world championship.
Regarding the future Fernández thinks “that if they keep their feet on the ground, if they continue their work, they have enormous possibilities, but they are not the only ones working to be champions, and now with the added stimulus of ending their dominance.”