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Chapter 2, Literature Review:
[.] One phenomenon that can be observed quite often is that teams using the additional court player, mostly the 7th court player, try to go for the 1st wave when having the chance to go for a fast break, however, they opt not to go for a 2nd and 3rd wave or fast throw-off (Feldmann, 2016) in order to have time to include their additional player into the positional attack. As the rates of the extended fast breaks are still rather high (Bauer, 2016), the question arises if that is a reasonable choice (Riemschneider, 2018). Consequently, when playing without fast breaks or fast throw-offs, the chance of situational numerical advantages is lost, whereas a systematic numerical court player superiority in the positional attack is achieved.
Typical usage of the 7th court player includes
- man-marking of one player by the opposing defense. However, this often leads to the advantage for the offense, that the marked player has a shorter way to the bench to substitute
- offensive man-oriented defense formations (3:3, 1:5, man-to-man). Using a 7th court player leads to the consequence that man-orientation is not possible anymore and the often standard offensive defense formation is given up (Bauer, 2010; Burkowski, 2013)
- being behind on the scoreboard (Feldmann, 2016)
- immediately before the half-time break, as an opposing attack gets unlikely
- when having problems to score in general (Bachmann, 2014; Bauer, 2010; Burkowski, 2013)
- the last attacks of a game (when a goal is needed)
Often the release action is started from a standing position with tempo changes, as the defense does not pressurize the offense due to its rather defensive formation (Späte, 2016a), leading to higher demands in precision and timing of the attack, as less space is available in depth, but also less technical faults of the attack are present (Riemschneider, 2018) probably due to the reduced defense pressure.
In 6 against 6 with an additional court player in numerical inferiority, it seems that all release actions are played as in the normal 6:6 formation. In 7:6, however, the four classical release actions are played in unequal amounts. As already two pivots are positioned near the circle, transitions are seldom observable (Riemschneider, 2018). The amount of crossings is lower compared with the attacking in 6:6 (ib.). However, contradictory to the finding of Späte (2016b) it was still present in 21.2% of the attacks in the European Championships 2018 (Riemschneider, 2018). Parallel-movements together with screen & roll seem to be the main tactical moves, mostly in combination with each other, to play in the widely used 3:4 formation when attacking with 7 players. The question arises why the normal playing concepts of a team are seldom used in playing 7:6 and if doing so would make the offense actions even more unpredictable. All teams on all levels analyzed did not mark one specific player, so that all players were eligible to re-change with the goalkeeper if the ball possession changed or even earlier because of tactical reasons.
Many authors, who found descriptive improvements (see figure 6) following the use of a 7th court player, criticized the small sample sizes of their own study, which partly may have led to the lack of significant results.
The present study will deliver the highest number of cases in which a 7th court player was utilized by including all DKB Handball-Bundesliga teams for the period of 2 years since the amendment of rule 4:1, leading to 15 teams having 2 years and 6 teams having 1 year of analysis due to relegation.
