Trail of the Lion King

I’d been to watch the tennis at the Olympic Park and as I was heading back to the subway station afterwards I noticed a few television trucks outside of the Fencing Gymnasium. There was a sign outside mentioning handball and as one of the doors to the venue was open I went inside to see if there was anything going on. I could hear noises from behind a curtain and a closer look revealed that there was indeed a handball game taking place.

Behind the curtain.

To be truthful handball isn’t a game that I’ve ever given very much thought to. I occasionally stumble across a match as I’m flicking through the tv channels, but I rarely watch for longer than the time necessary to establish that it’s, well, handball.

I’m usually quite happy to watch most sport, but handball just seems like an unnecessary version of football, albeit not so good. Sports like rugby or basketball are different enough from football to make them interesting, handball though is really just a rip-off of a game of five-a-side with your mates. The only difference seems to be that you use your hands rather than your feet.

I’ve read that it’s popular in Scandinavia, but then again, so are fermented shark burgers. It still doesn’t make it right. Curiosity trumped reticence though and I joined around five hundred other spectators. A team in red that I later discovered to be Choongnam were playing a team in blue that turned out to be a side owned by Doosan. The game was ten minutes into the second half and Choongnam were ahead by a few.

Choongnam on the attack.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with any of the rules other than you aren’t allowed to kick the ball, I’ll pass on what I spotted. If you imagine five-a-side football, but with seven players on each team that’s it. So, seven-a-side football. I couldn’t work out whether outfield players were allowed in the box or not and I’m not sure the ref knew either. Maybe the players just decide between themselves before the start, but don’t really pay much attention to it. Whatever. They’ve borrowed two minutes suspensions from ice-hockey but that’s about the only difference that I noticed.

It’s quite an aggressive game, or at least this one was, with players regularly getting clattered. I kept an eye on the keepers as apparently it was during Peter Schmeichel’s time as a handball goalie that he developed his famous ‘star-jump’ shot stopping technique. Both keepers spread themselves in a similar way whenever the ball was hurled towards goal but, unlike Schmeichel, rarely seemed to know where the ball was going until it either hit the back of the net or smacked them in the chops.

Interestingly, Schmeichel’s other trademark activity of bollocking the defence whenever he made a mistake didn’t seem to be something that he’d picked up from his handball days.

A Doosan player tries the ball concealment tactic known as ‘Drug-smuggling’.

Choongnam kept their lead until the end, running out 28-22 victors. Oddly though it was Doosan who celebrated, receiving a trophy, throwing their coach in the air and lining up behind a banner where one fella mixed up his V for Victory gesture with something else altogether.

Harvey Smith celebrates another win.

The mystery was solved when I discovered that this match was the second leg of the Championship play-off and so I assume that Doosan must have gone into the game with at least a seven goal advantage from the previous encounter.  I’ve no idea whether it was close or not. Doosan could have just nicked a thrilling aggregate victory or they could have strolled through a match made meaningless by the first leg. The air-conditioning was good though and that’s what mattered most.

This entry was posted on October 9, 2012 at 6:11 am and is filed under Handball, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.