3rd August: Handball

As soon as the athletics had finished, I scooted off to meet up my friend Joe (who was with us at the Opening Ceremony) and my friend Nicky who was coming to the handball, but we chilled out for a good long while over lunch, and the obligatory pic in front of the stadium!

Because this was the start of the athletics, the park was just crammed with people, and trying to hit up the London 2012 store proved that!

In the past days I'd gone in with another friend, and there was a decent stock of stuff, but today it honestly looked like a plague of locusts had gone through it.  The pictogram T-shirts were almost all gone, and the place was bedlam!

We had a bit more luck in one of the outlying shops and after the obligatory pic in front of the stadium, Joe headed off and we headed off to try and get our heads around Handball!

Handball - it's like a game you make up when you are a kid and you want to have something that all the neighbourhood can play, before someone gets called in for tea-time, let's make up any old rules and here we are!

Nicky called it: "Freeforallball - if you don't like violence stick to netball; you couln't play this game if you had anger management issues."

We did our best trying to figure out the rules - as far as we could make out you could only bring someone down (apparently neck-locks are the tool of choice) in the dotted lines bit.

At the start when they are introducing the teams there is a LOT of high fiving and hugging - see it all STARTS friendy...

First up was Sweden and Spain.
We did our best trying to figure out the rules - as far as we could make out you could only bring someone down (apparently neck-locks are the tool of choice) in the dotted lines bit.

Sweden seemed to be the in-form side, but from the outset the Spanish goalie was making lots of good saves early on, and picked up a bit.

In fact the match was really close, although players seemed to come on to take penalties, save penalties etc regardless of either they were on a two minute suspension.

In the end it there was only one point in with Spain edging Sweden out 25-24.

This is obviously a BIG sport in Europe and the crowds were in to support Denmark and Norway.

This was another really close one - basically a goal at each end every minute.

The women did not (literally) pull any punches, and we were convinced that in the men's matches blood would be splilt...

Well I'd found out... as I had a ticket for the Men's Bronze Medal match on the last day...