Estafana Pullman had to leave Esbjerg: ‘After nine years it makes me so sad’ | other sports

Pullman still has a one-year contract at Esbjerg. The club wants to rent it to another club in Denmark or abroad, but terminating the contract is also an option, according to Esbjerg.

The Gelderse build up player has been with Esbjerg since 2013, with whom she is a three-time national champion. Pullman played 240 games for Esbjerg and is the club’s all-time leading scorer with 1,270 goals. She has a relationship with former footballer Raphael van der Vaart, who works as a coach for Danish football club Esbjerg fB.

Pullman clashed with the Esbjerg coach a few weeks ago. I barely got any time to play and felt left out. “After nine years, I would have expected more respect,” Pullman said recently.

Pullman expected that she would soon sit down with the club to discuss the situation. Instead, she received an email yesterday with the message that she was no longer in the club’s plans. This is what upsets the veteran handball player.

,, Let it be clear that this is the club’s decision. “This is not how my time at this club should end,” she said in a statement. I came here in 2013 and I am glad that I was able to contribute with my team-mates to the club’s progress, league titles and other successes.

After playing here for nine years, this situation makes me very sad. For a long time I tried to find the best possible solution for the club, the coach and myself. For weeks I tried to arrange an appointment with the coach. Unfortunately, I must say that I understand very little about this method of communication.”

Pullman notes that she still has a contract until the summer of 2023. The club will contact me to let you know what we have to do until then. I won’t comment further at the moment.”

At the beginning of last year, Pullman, one of the stars in the 2019 World Cup that Orange won, extended her contract with the largest Danish club until the summer of 2023. At that time she was recovering from a serious knee injury. After months of rehab, the professional player returned to the field in the spring of 2021, but in May she suffered another knee injury that required surgery. As a result, Pullman missed the Olympic Games in Tokyo. She did go to the disappointing World Cup finals in Spain at the end of last year, but the not-yet-fit Orange star didn’t get much time to play.

“It is important for the club that Estafana is able to continue her career as much as possible and we want to contribute as much as possible to that,” said Esbjerg president Bjarne Pedersen. , in the event of major national and international victories, we like to refer as a club to the group, but we also count on outstanding individual performance. Essie has made an unparalleled contribution to the fact that Esbjerg’s team now belongs to the top of European handball clubs.”