HANDBALL: Julian Drew
IF you mention handball to most South African sports fans it will conjure up images of a partisan soccer crowd baying hopefully at the referee every time the ball ricochets off a defender in the penalty area.
To the rest of the world, however, it is a fast and exciting team sport second only in popularity to soccer in terms of participants and indeed, among women, it is the world’s top team sport.
Handball is played by a team of seven players, six outfield players and a goalkeeper, and is basically like a combination of soccer and basketball. The court is 40m long by 20m wide and the goalkeeper’s area is protected by a goal-area line which is six metres from the goal. An attacking player may not touch the ground in this semi-circle before releasing a shot on goal.
The ball is like a mini soccer ball with a diameter of between 54-60cm and is small enough to be picked up with only one hand.A player can hold or run with the ball for a maximum of three seconds or three steps after which the player must bounce it on the ground or pass to another player.
A squad of 12 players may be used, 10 outfield and two goalkeepers, and substitutions are allowed at any time. Players can be suspended from the game for two minutes for minor offences and can also receive yellow and red cards which lead to permanent expulsion from the game. it is an extremely fast sport with many goals and end to end action.
The game was developed in Germany and first staged at the Olympics in 1936 as an outdoor game contested by teams of 11 players. Handball only became a permanent fixture on the Olympic programme in 1972 when it was re-introduced as an indoor sport with seven players on each side.
With no handball tradition in England, the game was only established there in the 1980s. The sport didn’t find its way to South Africa except as a minority event among a few expatriate Europeans.
That situation changed when Milena Ivanovic, a former Yugoslavian international player, decided to divert all her attention to her first love, which is handball. After leaving home three years ago due to the political situation in her country, Ivanovic became a successful businesswoman before taking the plunge to try to establish handball in South Africa.
She recruited Risto Buha, one of the world’s top handball coaches from Yugoslavia, and then with his help persuaded 11 top young women players from clubs in and around Belgrade to come to South Africa and form the Cosmos Handball Club.
Buha came out in March this year to start a development programme in conjunction with the National Sports Congress, while the 11 players only arrived two months ago. The girls live together in a house in Bruma with their own cook and have been training hard for the past two months to prepare for the Intercontinental Handball Club championships which are taking place at the newly refurbished Wembley Indoor Arena next to Turffontein race course.
With no other teams to play against in South Africa the Cosmos players might have been seen to be taking a step backwards in their careers by coming to Johannesburg. But that is not the case, according to Vladislava Buha, the team’s top player. “We couldn’t play outside Yugoslavia so we came to Africa to help develop the sport here. That is very important.”
The tournament at Wembley started last Friday and will continue until Sunday and so far the young Cosmos side has done well in the B section of the competition. They beat Matchedje (39-15) and Maxaquene (28-25) of Mozambique and drew with TSV Auerbach (21-21) from Germany’s second division.
In the A section, seven of the world’s top teams are battling for supremacy, and for anybody interested in watching what is reputed to be the biggest club tournament of its kind ever staged, tickets are still available for today and the weekend at R10 for adults with children under 12 free.