Håndbold

Today the whole of Denmark is going wild because they have become the first country ever to win the men's handball World Cup three times in a row.

It's funny when you immigrate to somewhere not too far from where you started out in life. I guess subconsciously you assume the culture in the new place will be more or less the same as at home, but here we are with nearly 6 million people interested in a sport I had never seen and only knew the name of until a few years ago.

Given the hype, I decided to watch a couple of matches. Now that was an eye-opener. Having grown up in a football and to a lesser extent rugby country, I am used to seeing the football World Cup. When you watch football, you watch in anticipation, hoping someone will score a goal. In the 90 minutes, you rarely get more than two or three, so you could miss the goals if you blink, or nip into the kitchen to make a coffee. 

Now that I'm a seasoned handball watcher (I've seen three matches including the final), it seems to me (Danes may correct me if I am wrong), you watch handball for the non-goals, the misses. The match takes a hour in total. One team scores at one end, then the other team gets the ball and rushes to the other end to score in turn, this pattern repeats approximately once a minute for the entire match, so the goals become boring, the exciting bit is when a team misses their turn on goal and the other side get ahead for a few minutes.

It is strange to watch a sport where you are essentially only interested in the misses and not the goals.

Finally, with Denmark four goals ahead last night with only two minutes to go, the French team simply stopped playing, knowing they could not catch up, and simply started milling about the court looking dejected and hugging each other. I can't imagine that in a football match.