I’m going to cut to the chase, today February 4^th at 4:30 PM most of Poland will be watching the final of the Handball WC (not the Super Bowl XLI), yep you are reading it right, HANDBALL!!!  Currently there is a WC of this in Germany and the Polish team managed to get to the final, stories about the team are in every magazine and newspaper, even though nobody know their names J, much less the ones of their opponents, to be honest, I really doubt that people even know the rules or that there was a WC of the sport itself (just to clarify this sport is mainly played in Europe so to call it a WC is being a bit pretentious but hey, in US they call the World Series to their annual baseball championship final), but people ARE GOING INSANE with this.  On Thursday Iwonka and I went to a night club that was showing boxing on TV (I have no clue why they were doing that), and people were screaming every time the results of the handball WC semifinal were put on the screen, Poland beat Denmark after a double overtime.  You should see the faces, it’s so funny, people really care about this thing even though they didn’t know the sport existed one week ago, I feel like watching Dodgeball – The movie when watching these matches, the players look like porn actors and the trainers like corrupt politicians, during the semifinal between Germany and France (which Germany won after, you guessed it right, TWO overtimes) the tension in the public was really really strong and at the same time so laughable, I actually went to youtube.com and looked for some evidence of the match and of course I found it (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBciw5Oyvio).  By the way, in Germany they are even worse, how the hell can they fill a 30000 stadium I have no clue and second comment for some reason aljazeera has paid a lot of money in publicity during this tournament.

To explain this we have to go back to the real WC back in June, you are right, the football one. It all started in Germany, it is well known (and god knows very well documented too) that during the WC Germans showed a bit of emotions, I still can remember people crying after the Germany-Italy match.  Some of this must have gotten into Poland too, since at the end of the WC people here were quite sheered up, watching every match, showing the flags that a beer company (Tyskie) did for the national team and there were a bunch of commercials with old football stars like Boniek (the first polish player to be in Juventus), but I didn’t see this coming.  I even wrote an article before the beginning of the WC about the lack of enthusiasm in Poland for the event, even though historically the national team has been pretty good (I post it in my blog today).

Around October, Poland got their first Formula 1 driver (Robert Kubica), and you can imagine that people started watching Formula 1 more and more, but again, Formula 1 is a pretty popular sport around the globe.

Then in December everybody went crazy about Poland getting to the final of the Volleyball WC in Japan, but that made a bit of more sense, since people in Poland are good in Volley (actually it has beaten Venezuela several times), the women team has won several times the European championship, and people do follow the men team, plus the sport has improved a lot lately thanks to a change in its rules. Nonetheless nobody thought the polish team was going to do so well in Japan, and by when everybody got fired up watching the games all the commercials were of toys (I would say some TV people missed an opportunity of cashing some money).

But how did we move from football to handball, is still an enigma, but I’m enjoying it a lot, I like the fact that people are getting to watch sports (which I love) plus I can make fun of sports like handball (I’m actually curious about which sport will come next? Bowling? Dodgeball?).  To finish I just want to put 4 more things that show that things are changing:

1. Yesterday we were at a party where people at some point of time turned on the TV to watch a Poland-Estonia friendly football game, that for some strange reason was being played in Spain, people wanted to see the match even though Poland was winning 4-0 and we were at a PARTY!!!.
2. Some people are going to watch the Super Bowl today.
3. People even have faith on the new young football team.
4. Night clubs are putting eurosport on their TV’s instead of the Fashion Channel.