Hearing the crowd (or even the commentator!) shouting “handball” is one of the great sounds of football matches around the world, and a second or two later the referee makes a decision which will either delight or frustrate those fans. It’s perhaps a little sad though that this form of handball is far more famous than the sport of the same name!

This fairly minor indoor sport has been a regular Olympic sport since 1972 (1976 for the women’s game) although it was first played at the Berlin 1936 games outside. Thank you Wikipedia for that information! Despite having been an Olympic sport for my whole life I am sure I had never seen more than a few seconds of a match!

It was time to change that in this year of watching as many new sports as possible. I ventured on over to Arena Tachikawa Tachihi in the western part of Tokyo. The arena is located a couple of stops from Tachikawa station on the Tama Monorail but I thought I’d save a couple of hundred yen by just taking the 20 minute walk. It was a nice evening and I had time on my side. Eventually the arena came into view and there was a sizeable crowd of people waiting in line. As is often the case in Japan, it was for the food trucks and thankfully not to get in!

Just ahead of the 7:00pm start, there was the inevitable cheerleader performance which still seem to precede many sports in Japan. The feminism movement still lags a fair way behind in Japan, and the sexualisation of things like this is still quite rife. The amount of older men with long lens cameras focusing on such activity is a little unnerving at times.

The 3000 seat arena, which opened in 2017, is more used to hosting basketball or futsal games but on this occasion it was a handball match between two teams from Shinagawa (Tokyo) and Miyoshi (Saitama) which makes me wonder why this particular venue was chosen!

Fellow Leicester City fan Max mentioned to me at the Celtic Vs Yokohama F. Marinos game in mid-July that the PSG handball team were playing some friendlies in Japan at the same time as the football team last Summer. Subsequently I looked at those dates but they sadly didn’t match up with my work schedule. However, the idea of watching handball had been firmly planted in my mind and so I checked out to see if there were any mens or women’s teams in Tokyo. There wasn’t any for the latter but there were a few men’s teams from the capital city. The most appealing one to me were called Zeekstar Tokyo but the only fixture suitable for me wasn’t until late November!

A four month wait to see them play ended on November 22nd (a school holiday for me) but it should be added that getting a ticket was an arduous task. I think some sports in Japan really don’t help themselves potentially grow as it is often necessary to set up an account on a different site (I am signed up to so many ticketing sites now!) which needs all kinds of personal data to be inputted. It is a lot of hassle and takes up time which the more casual fans will just give up on.

Trying to resist hilariously shouting “handball!” every time a player touched it!

It’s not just every sports club that has to have a mascot in Japan but pretty much every company too, and it is indeed big business in this country where kawaii cuteness really helps shift merchandise. This one is called Zeestar. Its lightning motif eyebrows supposedly represent speed!

Speed does play an important role in handball it seems. The initial build up play though can be quite slow with some tedious passing of the ball at the back whilst the opposition all sit back awaiting the attack. It eventually comes as they try to pass their way through their opponents defence.

Goals come thick and fast during the two thirty-minute halves and it is quite hard to keep with it all. The teams sometimes replied with a goal within seconds of conceding! I have said before that I’m not such a fan of sports where points are scored continuously. Maybe that’s why I mostly watch football and rugby as I can remember certain incidents well but for other sports the points scored are often very similar in style.

One common style of goal here was via a guy waiting right in the corner to collect the ball,  take a step or two before jumping into the area and throwing it into the back of the net.

The seven metre throw is the equivalent of the penalty but given that you can throw a dummy or three it seems quite easy to beat the keeper.

When a shot is saved it really does seem something of a surprise and it brings the fans of that team alive as they realise there is the chance of capitalising on that and going up the other end of the court and upsetting the rhythm of one team scoring and the other replying. Football goalkeeping great Peter Schmeichel and his son, Leicester legend Kasper used to play this sport and I believe their famed way of making their body like a star actually stems from their days of playing handball back in Denmark.

“Go, go Zeek” was continuously blasted out of the public address system (although in Japanese pronunciation it sounded more like “go go chi”) to encourage the Tokyo team to get back into the game in the closing stages but the gap could not be bridged and they lost.

Admittedly, my expectations for this sport beforehand were quite low but they were exceeded. With similarities to basketball, netball, water-polo (minus the water), futsal and many more it was certainly a sport which seemed familiar yet so different.

Final Score: Zeekstar Tokyo 29-37 Osaki Electric

Bonus: There are obvious similarities (the wooden court, running, bouncing a ball, passing, shooting etc) between handball and basketball and I went to see the latter a couple of weeks earlier.

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