Somalia’s national Bandy team suffered a defeat in its first match at the World Bandy Championship in Ulyanovsk, Russia.
The Somali team, playing the match few hours after touching down from Sweden, faced a strong and well experienced Czech Republican team with the score yielding 0:17.
Despite of the score line, the Somali team made a series of attempts during the game under a high tempo.
Following the match, Hared Anwar, one of the team’s defenders expressed his disappointment towards the results but was too optimistic on the upcoming fixtures.
‘’We just arrived to Ulyanovsk at 1 a.m, slept about 3 hours and at 9.30 a.m. the match started. Anyway, we will come back to the next game stronger and better.’’
Head Coach of the team, Per Fosshaug said that despite Czech team’s debut at World Championship, they turned out to be a strong rival, trained really well.
‘’The guys didn’t expect such serious opponents but last 20 minutes of the match they got into stride for all that missed balls. In next 5 games we will see definitely a big progress in team’s performance. They will start to score, I’m sure!’’.
In the next coming two matches which will be held on Thursday and Friday, Somalia will face Ukrainian and Mongolian teams.
Bandy, also and perhaps better known as Russian hockey, is played on a football sized field covered with ice, with two teams battling for control of an orange ball. The goal, as in many other team sports, is to get the ball in the opponent’s net.
Somalia’s bandy national team, participating in the championship for the third time became the first African team to participate in the competition in 2014 and made impressive performances in the competition though they were knocked out.
Anastasia Pi
Ulyanovsk/Russia
Horseed Media
Somalia team suffers defeat in first World Bandy Championship match – PHOTOS
Published: February 10, 2016
