Sunday evening on the beach of the Gulf of Oman: The first half time of the opener at the V Beach Handball World Championship ended in a disaster. The girls from Singapore lost 0:28 to Brazil. No goal, no chance but quite a lot of fun!

 

‘We are here to learn’, Shariffa Amalsharaff Aledroos said. She is the coach of the tournament’s youngest and smallest team. Eight girls out of nine from the island on top of the Malacca Peninsula are under 23 years of age. ‘They are not specialised in beach handball. They are normally involved in indoor handball ’, Aledroos explains.

 

So the girls from Singapore know that they will not win here. But this is not the team’s main goal. ‘After the 2010 Youth Olympic Games, which took place in Singapore, handball has been taking off at home, rather sooner than later Singapore will reach the top level on the Asian continent’, the coach explains. The Asians are grateful for the great assistance coming from the World Association. IHF lecturer Felix Rätz was in Singapore, a lot of material found its way from the IHF Headquarters in Basle to the small island with around five million inhabitants.

 

‘We ourselves also organise a lot of things’, Aledroos says with pride. ‘A big Beach Handball Fiesta was staged on our famous Sentosa Beach. Afterwards a lot of young school girls and boys got interested and wanted to learn more about the sport’, she states. Then she has to leave. Her team is waiting for the sole official of the Singapore delegation at this tournament. The young ladies were to meet Thailand in their next match. Before the start of the game the Singapore girls form a circle to shout the battle cry ‘Majulah Singapura’. It means ‘Forward Singapore’. But then the coach comes back for a moment. ‘I forgot one thing. Singapore applied to host the 2016 Beach Handball World Championship.’ Shariffa Amalsharaff Aledroos returns to her team. She is smiling. Later her team also loses to Thailand. But they score some goals and have fun.