Sweden Elks

HOW SWEDE FOOTY IS
Sweden sets out to take game to the Arctic Circle.

The history of Australian Football in Sweden began in 1993, when Ingmar 'Terry' Lundquist started the country's first club called the Helsingborg Saints.

Lundquist had moved to Melbourne at the age of seven, and it took little time for the young Swede to be infected with a typically Melburnian obsession with Australian Football.

At the age of 24 Lundquist moved back to Sweden, and soon started experiencing withdrawal symptoms.

However, after learning about the existence of the Danish Australian Football League (DAFL) while visiting the Australian Embassy in Copenhagen, Lundquist was inspired to start a team in Sweden.

Around the same time, new clubs started to spring up around the rest of the country. In 2003, the Gothenburg Berserkers were formed, and a year later a nine-a-side, three-team league was created in Stockholm, as well as a representative side, the Stockholm Dynamite.

This laid the groundwork for the annual E4 Cup matches - named after the main freeway between the regions - featuring the South Sweden Saints. Last year saw the establishment of new clubs in Karlstad, Falun and Uppsala. There has even been a team started up in the northern town of Svardsjo, despite having a population of only 5000. When the Svardsjo Crows played the Falun Diggers in June 2007, Sweden overtook Finland as hosting the most northerly game of Australian Football ever played. Both teams plan to go one better in 2009 and play a match above the Arctic Circle. It is hard to imagine that the founders of the game would have ever believed such a feat possible when they drew it up 150 years ago in Melbourne.

In response to the growing interest in Australian Football across the country, AFL Sweden (legally known as the Svenska Australiska Fotbolls Forbundet) was established in August 2007, becoming Sweden's first truly national representative body for the great game. Its inaugural chairman is Jimmy Ljunggren of the Karlstad Dragons.

With the establishment of SAFF, which made competing in the 2008 Australian Football International Cup as one of its primary goals, the Swedish Elks have been far more active. Regular 'friendlies' against regional rivals Denmark, Germany and Finland have become more common, and in 2007 the Elks won the EU Cup in Hamburg. The side plans to return to defend their title at the 2008 EU Cup in Prague in mid-October.

The Swedish Elks will be a truly national team, with players coming from all over the country. This will be the first time Sweden has competed in the International Cup and most of the players will be visiting Australia for the first time.

The fact that each of them is willing to regularly travel long distances to play matches, and even willing to pay their own way to Melbourne to play a virtually unknown sport is testament to their dedication to the game, and augurs well for the future of the sport in the heartland of the Elk.

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