28.11.2019, 02:14
Delving into a decade

BLOG: VELUX EHF Champions League commentator Tom Ó Brannagáin looks back on a decade of handball and ahead to the Match of the Week

Delving into a decade

I've lost count of the amount of times I have awoken in a strange hotel room, in some country wondering where I am and what I'm doing here, and, when I finally realise, wondering what the hell it's all about.

I suppose travelling to France for the final match of the week of this decade has brought back my toe-dipping, over 30 years ago, into Proust's A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. So this blog is a little look back into the past 10 years or so, to see the impact handball has had on me and sift through the mists of time that have fine-tuned some moments more than others in a kaleidoscope of hundreds of memories.

When I started in 2009, I never expected to still be here coming up on 2020. They say hindsight is 20/20 vision, but I'm going to be honest and say most of what I remember is a blur. But it's also said that it's not how many breaths you take, but the moments that take your breath away. The Berlin comeback against Leon stands out, the Kielce comeback against Veszprém is as keen as ever in my mind’s eye.

But it's mostly people I remember: the players who took me under their wing and accepted me, an unknown. Tennessee Williams put it best in A Streetcar Named Desire: "I have always depended on the kindness of strangers."

That was so true in the early years with the handball family and although it's continually morphing, that ethos has never been lost.

The changes we have seen in production, TV, branding and style of play have never diminished the basic tenet of handball. It's for everyone, it embraces everyone. It's the driving force for me that separates us from all the other sports. It's international, it's huge and yet it's as the Danes would say, "hygge".

Clubs have come and gone. Clubs have gone from small to huge in that time.

A muscular Match of the Week

PSG and their brand have become huge players on the scene, having not even registered on my radar when we began. Barça has been an ever-present and a huge influence on how I view the handball firmament.

How fitting that the last MOTW of this decade should be between two of the biggest brands in the world – something that was impossible to even envisage 10 years ago. The Stade de Coubertin is the venue, named after the man who espoused sports in French schools as a kind of "muscular Christianity".

Muscular is a good way to describe this team. They are strong and adaptable and they will need to be, playing against this Barcelona team which plays like a super-charged rocket. The first game between them this season was tight. Barça won, although Paris had injuries. To be honest, they've suffered from that all season. That's not surprising. As someone said to me: “Ballroom dancing is a contact sport, handball is a collision sport.” Let's hope for two fully fit squads and have a match that will be as eye-catching as so many of the matches of the last decade.

What's sure is that both of these teams will be in the VELUX EHF Champions League next season. For the others this season is like a version of "Handball's Got Talent". You may not be in with a chance of winning the competition, but you are certainly playing for your place in it in the years to come. I have to say that I've seen an increased level of competition this season, and maybe it's just me, but that may have something to do with it. I'm not complaining, it's been fantastic. But as Seamus Heaney wrote: "Between my finger and thumb, the squat pen rests, I'll dig with it."

It's been a roller-coaster 10 years that have exceeded my wildest imaginations of where they would take me or how big handball would become. Proust examined how our personal experience shapes the world around us; I like to think that handball has shaped my world.

I may wake in a Parisian auberge over the weekend thinking I can hear one of the kids crying and after a few seconds of complete panic realise where I am. Then the words of advice I first received in media will flood back: "Broadcast like it's your last time."

This game deserves it.

Every game we’ve done deserved it.

TEXT: Tom Ó Brannagáin / jh