The Other Hockey

The Summer Olympics have started, in case you haven't noticed. In the past, the experience of viewing the Olympics has consisted largely of watching glossily produced human interest pieces, sandwiched between various taped bits of Americans winning gold medals in things, all to a soundtrack of Bob Costas waxing hyperbolic. This year, however, NBC is using the internet to make much more of the action available live and in its entirety (as they should--if they're going to acquire exclusive legal rights to broadcast the Olympics, in my view they're obliged to provide to the consumer with as much of the Olympics as technically possible).

I've always been very curious about the sporting universe outside of the handful of sports that draw the vast majority of the attention (and airtime) in the United States. I once attended the world bandy championships and I have a working knowledge of cricket. This bit of an oddball streak in my personality probably contributed to my embracing ice hockey as a young person--it has always been just fringe enough that I get to feel special, yet accessible enough that I could actually become engaged in the sport.

One of the sports I've always wanted to see is field hockey. I've never had the opportunity to watch a live field hockey match in its entirety before, but that all changed this evening, with the opening of the women's tournament from the Beijing games--New Zealand versus Japan. NBC streamed the match over their Olympics website--just the international video feed, with no commentary, which was just fine, given how irritating 99% of sports commentary is.

I didn't expect that the sport would actually have much in common with ice hockey, and it doesn't. It's actually much more like bandy in terms of the size of the pitch (looks like it's a little bigger than a scrimmage football field but a little smaller than a typical soccer field), the number of players, and the general pace of play. The sticks are heavy and short, obliging the players to bend down quite a bit to play the ball, which is about the size of a baseball. The goals are fairly large and on the end lines, and, curiously, there's a rule that obliges an attacking player to shoot from inside an arc around the goal called the "shooting circle"--in other words, if you shoot from too far away, it won't count. (This means that no field hockey goalie will ever have to worry about pulling a Vesa Toskala.) In practice, it appears to be common for attacking players to attempt to drive the ball towards the goal from outside the line, hoping to get a rebound or deflection from a friendly player in a legal position--rather like ice hockey defensemen shooting from the point in hopes that a teammate will get a stick on the puck. Except in field hockey, if the shot goes in clean, it's no goal.

One thing I discovered I really like about field hockey is that it's unencumbered by any offsides rule, and by extension the irritating stoppages in play and whining that accompany offsides calls in other sports (especially soccer). The fact that an attacking player can never be in an offsides position, and is free to cherrypick if he or she likes, means that defenses must account for this--it tends to stretch defenses along the field's long axis, opening up space for play to proceed.

On to the match itself. New Zealand, to my untrained eye, appeared to have the better of the early play on a rain-sodden field, but Japan took the lead about twelve minutes in when one of their players broke free behind the New Zealand defense and scored. Japan added another goal a few minutes later off of a "penalty corner"--a set piece restart involving what amounts to a free centering pass, a bit like a corner kick in soccer. New Zealand pulled one back with a penalty corner of their own before halftime, but although they fought desperately for the entire second half, they couldn't find an equalizer, and the game ended with a 2-1 scoreline.

I highly recommend checking it out. The sport has an excellent pace to it, and the match I described above wrapped up in a tidy hour and a half, so it's not like it takes that much of an investment of time. It really is a wide world of sports out there.