Bandy is a sport few have heard of but the tale of a group of refugees from Somalia on the ice in Sweden is truly uplifting
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| Bandy on ice: The Somalia team (blue) will compete in the World Championships in Siberia Photo: REX FEATURES |
For a Manchester United-supporting cricket lover it has been a depressing start to the year.
Sport is the thing I follow to take my mind off all the other things that are worrying me: I do not want to have to agonise about why David Moyes cannot inspire an attack or Alastair Cook set a field.
Even the Winter Olympics, which you could normally count on to provide a few escapist tales of sporting heroism from men and women who think nothing of flinging themselves headfirst down a mountain on a tea tray, has this year become inescapably tangled in the complex reactionary politics of Russia.
I was moaning about all this on a shopping trip on Saturday with my friend Rachel. "But have you heard about the Somalian bandy team?" she said, whipping out her phone to show me a photograph. I had not but now I have, and I am suitably cheered.
In truth, I had not even heard of bandy. It is, I now know, a game not so dissimilar from ice hockey, except it is generally played outside on ice the size of a football pitch, and with a pink ball instead of a puck. It may also have very tiny goals, but that might just be the film I watched.
Given its nature, it is played by countries where it is easy to come across massive sheets of frozen ground: Finland, Russia and Sweden are the countries in the top league, though others such as Canada and Afghanistan also play.
But the world championships is contested by only 14 nations, which gives you some idea of the sport’s limitations.
This year, in Siberia, that number will rise to 15 because - wait for it - the countries of the shivering north are being joined by the Somali national team.
At some levels, like the Jamaican bobsleigh team, this is a bit of a gimmick - the Somalis are unlikely to score a goal in the championship, let alone win it - but it is nevertheless a heart-warming tale of community action and moral determination.
The Somalian team were formed in the Swedish town of Borlange, an old industrial town about 200 kilometres west of Stockholm.
Like the rest of Sweden, Borlange is beginning to face a rising immigrant population. Somali refugees, fleeing the violence in Mogadishu, now number around 2,000 in a total population of 50,000.
If you read the headlines, or the novels of Henning Mankell, you will know that the arrival of African migrants - often fleeing war in their own countries - has frayed the liberal surface of the Swedish state, triggering a rise in far right extremists, and provoking hostility (at worst) or cold indifference.
It was such problems that Patrik Andersson began discussing with some friends on a pub crawl last year. He could see the problems, but he wanted to find solutions - and the bandy team, binding the Somalis into the wider Swedish community, was born.
"If we are going to have to live together we are going to have to talk to each other to make Borlange a good place to live in," he told the BBC.
He is now team manager. In another interview, he said, simply: "I'm doing it for me and my children. I want to stay in Borlange. I want this to be a nice place."
With the help of coach Per Fosshaug, something of a bandy legend, he has built Africa's first bandy team from scratch: these are men who only started to skate a few months ago.
Fosshaug, though, has no doubt of their capacity to achieve.
"In their home country they have experienced things we don't even want to dream about so going on ice, going on skates, was nothing for them in that way."
Beyond the dreams of integration, of making a better society, it is the sheer pleasure of the Somali players, incongruous in their baggy red jumpers and warm padding, that makes the story so uplifting.
In Swedish reports, they smile broadly as they talk about the way that they are making history by their endeavours.
One of them, Abdul Lakiim Osman said he felt he had made more friends playing bandy than he ever had trying soccer. Another, Ahmed Hussain Abdi said: "It just feels amazing representing Somalia in a world championship. I am going to be proud of myself."
So he should be. His joy at representing his home country in a sport in which his new country excels is genuinely inspiring. It says a lot about the power of sport, but even more about the human spirit which can find a way of moving forward, reaching out, changing, even if it does involve running around on ice in sub zero temperatures.
Source: telegraph.co.uk
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