Handball championship and other girly stuff

I feel like I should say something about this European handball championship that ended a couple of days ago. I always feel like I should say something. About whatever. I have this need to comment. A real and sometimes problematic need.

So this handball championship. Every time the same thing. Just to be clear, I love handball championships, way better than the football ones; they're more exciting and fast and furios and interesting, to put it shortly. Football (or soccer, call it as you wish) lasts too long and can be quite boring. The male population is clicking the little x now on my blog and refuses to read any further because football is sanctity and something that should be utterly praised and always discussed about. Ya ya ya, whatever, for me it's still nothing to be crazy about. At least on TV. When watching it live, you share this excitement with the crowd and it makes you feel all woo-hoo! But not on TV.

Handball, on the other hand, keeps me interested because the scores are constantly changing; if the game is really good, you don't know who's gonna be the winner till the last second. And some of the players are cute. Tall, strong, all sporty and cute. Some are quite ugly, too. I was actually surprised how not-good-looking the Swedish representation was. So many of them with long, drenched in sweat hair, some weird faces. I don't know. Maybe I didn't wear glasses when watching that game, who knows.

Anyway, what I wanted to say was, every time the same thing. Our team is great, they win one game, two games, they're the best in their group, they come to the semi-finals and whopla, they lose! Every time we say, they were great, better luck next time. But this "next time" never seems to come. This year - the same story.

We had a great game against already mentioned Sweden, then came France. Like in the last championship, our team was winning in the first half; in the second half, it was like some other team was playing and not ours: they played quite shitty. France won.

Next two games we won again. Then the semi-finals with Denmark, we lost.

Ok, this time it wasn't completely their fault. I know it may sound stupid or something I'm saying just because our team lost, but it's not, everybody who was watching the game can confirm it: the referees were not fair. They overlooked on purpose some of the fouls that Denmark team made, but they punished our players for every step they made. I guess it's normal that a Danish player doesn't get anything for the broken nose of our player but they get 7 meters for our player pushing theirs. Even Karabatić, who I strongly dislike (like the whole Croatian nation, I guess, since the day he got into a little quarrel with Balić in the game), said it was obvious that the referees ruled for Denmark.

I'm not saying we would have won if the game was fair, maybe we wouldn't, but at least we would have lost because we were not good enough, not because some two German douchebags decided they wanted Denmark to win.

That's how I feel about handball championship 2014. I was so upset after the game (and I don't get upset because of sport, I just don't) that I couldn't work on my seminar paper which was planned for that night. And I didn't watch the finals match. I heard French guys destroyed Denmark. Well, whatever. (I am a bit happy because of the result though, complete smash-smash-smaaash!)

And how we watched Croatia-Denmark match...

My flatmates and me, I mean. The TV got broken in the afternoon, that is the signal got lost, but we forgot about it. We put the chicken, potatoes and carrots in the oven. When the time of the match came, we put on the TV but the picture and sound was blocking every couple of seconds. Anamarija, one of the flatmates, was peacefully eating at the table, not giving a shit. Ivana and me were nervous because we wanted to watch the game. We realized that the cable wasn't functioning because the wire that was attached to the digital-signal-TV-thingy didn't stick to it anymore. I went to ask for the screwdriver to the landlord's mother but she didn't open the door. So Ivana took a little knife and was playing with the electricity, I was the helper holding stuff, passing the bottle of wine and the candle to hold the wire tight to the digital thingy. We did that for like 10 minutes before the game started, and 10 minutes of the game. Then I decided to stream the game, but of course there was no Croatian stream (or I just couldn't find it) so I started a Spanish one. So the situation: TV turned on but with the blue screen, Ivana and me eating chicken and potatoes, Anamarija on her laptop trying to find a Croatian stream, the match in Spanish on my laptop, me screaming: "Dos minutos! Dos minutos! Puta madre!" and all the Spanish swearwords I could think of in that moment. After the first half, we fixed the TV, but then it was the match that needed fixing.

After this whole excitement, somebody would say I'm a huge handball fan.

But funny thing, I never watch a handball match on TV unless it's a championship. Sometimes I don't even know when the championship begins, I just don't keep track of these things. So does that make me a real handball lover or just a faker? Because I do feel fake when the game finishes. I barely know the names of our players, I don't even know all the rules of the game, but still I scream at the TV like a real sports fan. If I'm a faker, then at those moments I'm a real good one. And not just then... But in everyday life as well, as I feel sometimes. But about that on some other occasion.

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