We mock relentlessly cheery sorts by trilling ‘Jolly hockey sticks!’- But who came up with this annoying phrase? She can’t have been a hockey player, or she’d have known that the hockey stay is a mean looking article!

With its head of difficult mulberry wood, the stick could pass for a cudgel – but fear not, hockey is a non-contact sport. Avid gamers shouldn’t touch each other with body or stay, and even stick-to-stick contact is forbidden; but many of them wear gum shields and tape up their knuckles, just in case! Hockey goalkeepers are as plushly padded as the average American footballer – they wear helmets, leg-guards and foam foot-protectors (kickers).

The stick’s head is flat on one side and rounded on the other; you are able to only touch the ball with the flat side. When dribbling the ball, you can tap it from side to side; but you should flip the stick over again and once again, to ensure that you only use its flat face.

This tricky technique – wobbling – is occasionally known as the Indian dribble, as it was invented by Indian avid gamers. Between 1928 and 1968, the men of India and Pakistan won every single Olympic hockey contest. Because then, several other nations have managed to win gold medals; in 1988, even Britain managed it!

Women have played at the Olympic Games because 1980, and the game’s governing entire body, the Federation Internationale de Hockey (FIH), holds a World Cup each and every four years, At club level, hockey is an very popular participation sport It’s an II-a-side game, played more than two 35-minute halves; you score goals by hitting the ball into your opponents’ net with your stay.

The rules are similar to those of football. In football, there are corner kicks, penalty kicks, free kicks and throw-ins; hockey has its equivalents in long corners, penalty strokes, free hits and hit-ins. Like footballers, hockey avid gamers may not block an opponent’s path to the ball (obstruction), or be caught off-side – even though they can only be off-side in the field’s final quarter.

You will find some vital differences, though. Footballers would be lost without their feet, but to hockey players, feet are foul play; they aren’t allowed to lay boot on ball, even by accident. If play stops via nobody’s fault – an accidental injury, for instance – hockey restarts with a bully-off.

Two avid gamers square up more than the ball, click sticks three times, and tussle for possession. And hockey has dramatic penalty corners, given when a defender commits an unintentional foul within the shooting circle, or an intentional foul in his 23m area. An attacker stands on the goal line, at least 9m from the goalpost; he plays the ball back, one team-mate stops it, and an additional whacks it. Shots from penalty corners must hit the backboard at the base of the net to count, unless they’re deflected upwards by a defender.