hockey,but no skates !

Field Hockey

After i already published a post about American sports including NHL ( North American Ice Hockey league)
I want to look a a quite closely related sport this time, even though, it is not played indoors and you don’t need skates, but proper footwear to perform it .

Field hockey

So it is : Field Hockey !
Probably very well known worldwide because it is performed more or less all over the globe .
Field hockey is actually one of the oldest competitive sports and dates back well before the Ancient Olympic Games.
It is not 100 % evidenced but 4,000-year-old drawings have been found in the tomb of Beni-Hasen in the Nile Valley of Egypt showing men playing a sport that experts are almost sure was field hockey.
The modern game was founded in public schools in England as early as the beginning of the 19th century .
Due to the formation of first hockey club in 1849 (Blackheath),the founding of the Hockey Association in London followed in 1886 .
The british army then also brought the game to the former colonized countries and though the first international competition was played in 1885.
At the 1908 London Games, field hockey was introduced into the Olympic Games it was dropped again in 1924 but reinstated 1928 in Amsterdam and has been a Olympic sport ever since .
In the early days field hockey was only a men’s sport because it was considered to be far to dangerous for women .
But the participation of women became more and more popular and so Hockey was probably the first team sport for women.
The Hockey field is pretty similar to a normal football pitch (91.40 m × 55 m) but with smaller goals (2.14 m high and 3.66 m wide ,comparable to a handball goal) and artificial “water-based” turf .

Hockey field

These surfaces are used at professional level nowadays because they speed up the game and are much more smooth and harder than normal artificial sand turf or grass surfaces.
The game is played in two halves of 35 minutes each with a 5 minute break .
Even though the game is a pretty ruff and physical game there are at least some rules preventing the players
from getting properly hurt .
This is called dangerously played ball ,and is performed when the player deliberately takes part in evasive action. This includes fighting, verbally abusing other players and breaking the rules set by the International Hockey Federation and if the ball is lifted above the knee and at an opponent who is within 5 m of the ball.

But like everyone still can guess that sometimes , even if just accidentally , players get hit by the ball or racket because everyone is up on adrenalin and wants to win the game no matter what happens to the opponent.

Very critical and dangerous situations are corners . Why ? Watch here :

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