AIK wins another hockey derby
Last night I went and photographed Stockholm’s hockey derby between AIK and Djurgården. Normally the Stockholm hockey teams play at a smaller stadium called Hovet, but for the derby they move next door to the much larger Globen area.
As a photographer going to Globen can be a bit of an irritation. For some reason they have the press entrance on the opposite side of where the actual press room is located. This really wouldn’t be to much of a problem except for the derby the stadium is locked down in order to prevent fan violence, making moving from section to section very difficult. Plus it seems that most of the people working events don’t even know where a lot of things are located.
Looking past those little inconveniences Globen really is a superior hockey stadium than Hovet. It really is a shame that they can’t play all Elitserien matches there because the atmosphere is so much better there.
The evening started with a clash between police and Djurgården supporters. I was already down by the ice at the time it started but you really couldn’t tell what triggered. To me it seemed like the fans drove the police out of their area. The police then responded by charging in with their batons out and swinging.
As a result of this the match didn’t start on time. The respective team captains came out and asked for the fans to remain calm, but in the end the delay saw fans abandoning the match and leaving.
When the match finally got under way AIK was clearly the better team of the evening. Djurgården was often sloppy and losing the puck to AIK players who were very quick to move up pitch into attack. Djurgården’s only real saving grace of the evening was that every time AIK scored they came back and quickly tied it up. It happened with every goal, AIK took the lead and then minutes later it was all squared again.
After Djurgåren tied it in the third period I thought they might go and steal it in overtime as they seemed to be growing. Unfortunately for them that wasn’t the case as Johannes Salmonsson, who earlier had scored the 3-2 goal, went and scored another goal in sudden death.
I have to admit I’m amazed that they have that level of violence at Ice-hockey games !!
It seems like in recent years this has been both an ongoing and growing problem in Sweden. They do a lot of talking about hooligans but there is very little action.
Personally I think the problem could be very easily solved, just prosecute them and start giving out lifetime bans from sporting events. People would learn how to behave fairly quickly.