12th August: Handball (Men's Bronze Medal Match)

Once more into the Stratford breach, dear friends.
It was with a sense of relief that I ran onto the platform but saw a near empty train for Stratford - so I snaffled a seat and settled in for my last trip to Stratford for London 2012.
Lucky I heard on the tv this morning that the Modern Pentathlon was starting off in the CopperBox (which was where the handball had been earlier).
The medal matches had moved into the larger "Wedding Cake" Basketball Arena.

The first thing immediately noticeable was the number of French and Swedish people wanting to swap their Bronze medal match tickets (Hungary/Croatia) for the final.
Everywhere you looked, which made me worry whether there would be empty seats in this match.

As I got in, the commentators were saying that Hungary had never won any of their Olympic Bronze Medal matches.

We even had a bit of drama as two Hungarian fans wanted to put a flag up on the stands, but were taking an age to do it.  Other fans were getting annoyed as they were in the way, and eventually an official told them they couldn't do it, so the guy grabbed his flag and stormed off in a huff.

From the outset, Croatia seemed to be very strong on set plays - the Hungarians seemed to throw themselves on the floor, lobbing the ball into the goal.

The first half was pretty close for most of it, but towards the end Croatia built up a 5-goal lead.

Hungary started slowly in the second half, but had a burst of firm scoring 4 straight goals to keep themselves in touching distance.

But Croatia stepped up a gear in response, much to the disgust of a very vocal Hungarian fan (which caused a lot of amusement for everyone else as we started to have guessing games as to what she was yelling and screaming at their goalie).

Croatia just proved too strong for Hungary and strangely in the dying seconds, as some of the Croats on the sidelines started bouncing up and down, the Hungarians seemed to just give up the ghost and start shaking the Croatians hands.

You had to feel for them though - every time they have reached this stage, they have just missed out.

Maybe Rio?