Saturday 20th November 2021 15.00
Allsvenskan (Swedish top flight)
Malmö FF 2 BK Häcken 2 HT: 1-0 Att: 17,218
Kolak 5, Abubakari 84 : Jeremejeff 63, Walemark 70
Sunday 21st November 2020 15.00
Superliga (Danish top flight)
FC København 1 AGF 1 HT: 1-0 Att: 25,814
Lerager 45+1 : Mortensen 90+5 (pen)
In November my mate and I went on a scandinavian football adventure. The cities of Copenhagen, in Denmark, and Malmö, in Sweden are separated by the Øresund Bridge, which is the one in the Scandi drama of the same name, you know, the female detective with a penchant for woolly jumpers?
I had always thought that it would be a great hop to do Malmö and Copenhagen over a weekend, fixtures allowing, with the bonus of ticking off two countries. I must’ve expressed this dream to my mate, who came back to me, unexpectedly, with dates in November for just such a double, with Malmö playing on the 20th and Copenhagen on the 21st.
Adding extra spice and incentive, both teams were vying for their respective championships; Malmö looking favourites to win the Allvenskan, sitting just above Djurgärden and Copenhagen trying to close the small gap on leaders Midtjylland in the Superliga
That wasn’t all though. In the last 18 months I’d taken on another groundhopping style hobby, called parkrun tourism. Parkruns take place in about 20 countries worldwide, mainly in Europe. They are a 5k run, every Saturday morning at 9am. They’re open to everybody and tend to take place in parks and trails, often old railway lines. They started in Bushy Park in 2004. Since then, around 700 new venues have popped up, in the UK alone. I have two within 5 miles of me. There is a free app simply called 5k, (like futbology), that has all the stats for your parkruns and various geeky challenges and badges.
The most popular challenge is to run a parkrun starting with every letter of the alphabet, save X (of which there are none). Others include the stopwatch challenge, where you try to finish in a time where the seconds part is every number between 00 and 59. The most obscure is the fibonacci challenge. At each parkrun the events are numbered, and in the fibonacci challenge you must run at an event number corresponding to all the fibonacci numbers from 1 to 610.
I just love the stats. I think the only reason I took up running is for these stats. Anyway, as a result of this newfound hobby, I thought I’d see if Denmark did parkruns (or Sweden for that matter). It turns out both do, and in fact Denmark was the second country to take them up. There are six Danish ones in total, with four in the Copenhagen area. I was spoilt for choice!
The Groundhog 