Lightning Storm

The Yugoslav men's team went off to the European handball championships in Spain with moderate optimism: part of the public said anything below gold was failure and catastrophe.

Just prior to the start of the championships the national team had at least four jobs to do: win (at least gold) medals, secure a place in the Atlanta Olympic games, get included in the five best teams and secure a place in the world championships in Japan next year and of course "beat the Croats". To many the priorities come in the opposite order and the medal and Atlanta are nothing compared to a victory over the Croats, although no one here said what the Croats kept saying prior to last year's basketball championships: we'll be happy with any place as long as we beat Yugoslavia.

At the moment that this article is being written (Wednesday afternoon), the Yugoslav handball team got to two of the goals: they are within reach of a medal and they beat Croatia 27-24.

To some that seems enough. Even if there is no gold or Atlanta at least the Croats are beaten. And the press got an opportunity to use some of the headlines they almost forgot about like "Croats on Their Knees". Reports from the game made full use of the language of war. Some reporters made the FRY handball team out to be heroes, TV commentator Srdjan Knezevic cried with happiness and babbled on about anything that came to mind including innocent victims and saw the game as compensation for all the Lightning and Storm Croatian army operations, while an inspired Novosti reporter said "our defence was like clockwork and the attack was like a well placed howitzer battery".

The reports included a new world conspiracy against the Serbs which was seen in the fact that the TV reporter wasn't allows to smoke in the sports hall. There was room for God as well and reporters noted that Croatian team member Nenad Kljajic who laughed at the FRY national anthem finally got "deserved punishment when he hurt his spine in the game and stayed on the bench".

Contrary to custom, telegrams of congratulations came before the team won a medal. This time they came immediately after the game with Croatia. The Association of Krajina and Croatian Serbs said: "Hearty congratulations on your courageous sports victory. To those of us who were expelled from our homes this was more than a game."

Besides the inevitable settling of Serb-Croat accounts in sports, the participation of the FRY team at the European championships could be taken as a paradigm on how hard the return to the world was after the sanctions including unforeseeable risks, even when it's a case of a team that is top class and does much better than the economy or diplomatic service.

Despite efforts by many sports journalists to see more than a game in the FRY-Croatia match and continue the perverse interference of politics in sports, the teams on both sides did their best. Reporters forgot to mention that Perunicic and Cavar are friends and that coaches Zivkovic and Aslanagic are more than just friends. Instead the RTS reporter shouted out slogans and war cries to cover his ignorance of the job he's doing. At one moment he called the FRY team to pay the Croats back for what they did on the battlefield.

Even if they win the championships, like the basketball team did last year, and beat the Croats again in the finals, the FRY team won't give back their audience the pride, self-respect and territories taken away from them by the people who hurried to send telegrams.