We have visited the stadiums of Stade Leuven and Daring Club Leuven before, so we still had to visit the old stadium of Zwarte Duivels Oud-Heverlee to complete the Oud-Heverlee Leuven stadium tour. It took a while, but finally a couple of weeks ago we managed to visit the Gemeentelijk Sportstadion, which is still being used for youth games and injured players in recovery (there were actually a couple of them working on their recovery when we were there).
Zwarte Duivels Oud-Heverlee was the youngest of the three teams and the only one not from Leuven. It all started in 1957 when the team was founded. For almost 40 years they have fought their way up to the national leagues. In 1996 it finally happened when they gained promotion to fourth division. Four years later they even promoted to third division.
In 2002 Daring Club and Stade Leuven wanted to create one big team in Leuven. Stade was playing third division as well, but Daring Club descended down to the regional leagues. There were a lot of doubts the merger would be a healthy team and therefore a third team was requested to gain stability. The two Leuven teams found that third team in the neighbouring Oud-Heverlee with Zwarte Duivels Oud-Heverlee.
The merger proved to be a success as after this the team went to second and even first division. These days OHL is playing in second division.
The Gemeentelijk Sportstadion is definitely interesting to visit and it completes the OHL stadium tour perfectly. It's only sad to see no men's A games are being played here anymore. The women's team however is still playing here and on the highest national level even.
Comments