Olmps

DENMARK’S RIKKE SKOV ‘MAKES HERSELF BIG’ IN THE 2004 Women’S FINAL

Handball’s journey from northern European amateurism to global commercialism has not been smooth.. In Greece and Egypt, where the sport has become immensely popular, the ultras culture of the football stadium has reached the handball court. . Games between Olympiakos and Panathinaikos in Athens are accompanied by crude chants and regularly descend into punch-ups.. In Egypt, the Cairo derby betweenAlAhly and Zamalek has had to be abandoned after crowd disturbances and a 2010 encounter was preceded by street riots and attacks by Zamalek fans on the Al Ahly club complex..

The arrival of so much money in handball is also having a corrosive impact.. Rumours of match-fixing and bribery abound in the upper echelons of the game..A qualifying match for the 2008 Olympics between Kuwait and South Korea was so blatantly misrefereed by the Jordanian officials that it had to be replayed, the IOC having threatened to drop handball from the Games if it was not..

HOCKEY

29 July–11 August 2012

Hockey Centre, Olympic Park

Athletes: 384 | Golds up for grabs: 2

Olympic presence

Men: 1908, 1920, 1928–present; women since 1980.

Olympic Format

There are twelve teams in both the men’s and the

women’s events, divided into two qualifying groups, with the top two from each group going through to the semi-finals. . Lowerranked teams play a series of classification matches..

Contenders:

The Dutch, Germans and Australians look set to

field the strongest teams, with decent challenges to be expected from Argentina, Spain and the much improved British men’s and women’s teams..

Past Champions:

India: 8 | Holland: 4 | Australia: 4

Why Watch Hockey?

One could do worse than attend to the words of

Lord Lyttelton, the old Etonian Under-Secretary of State for War and the Colonies in the 1840s..A lifelong hockey fanatic, he explained his love of the sport in the Eton College Magazine: ‘It is a game in which, as in poetry, mediocrity is not tolerable: indeed, a bad game at hockey is one of the most stupid sights .... . but, on the

other hand, when it is played, as at Eton, with a considerable degree of dexterity, we think it one of the most elegant and gentlemanlike exercises, being susceptible of very graceful attitudes and requiring great speed of foot..’

The best part of two hundred years later, hockey is recognisably the same game that Lyttelton gushed over, and at the Olympics it will be played with more dexterity, speed and elegance than was ever managed in early Victorian England.. Olympic hockey offers the flow and teamwork of football, combined with skilled stick play and drilled, small-ball precision.. It’s also very physical.. Struck correctly, a hockey ball can travel at 100mph, and in the modern era the fitness of players produces a game of relentless ebb and flow.. Don’t expect mediocrity; do expect poetry..

The Story of Hockey

The urge to swipe the nearest object with a stick

and send it soaring into the air or scuttling along the ground is surely universal. . From North America to Africa and East Asia, hockey has been invented and reinvented a dozen times, but the version that is now the global standard has its roots in Western Europe..

Europeans have been devising their own versions of the sport for over a millennium, most enthusiastically on the continent’s Celtic fringe, where the Irish variant became hurling.. During the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, hurley sticks were the weapons of choice for many of the rural poor who marched on London; in the aftermath of the uprising, Richard II attempted to shore up his rule by ordering the burning of every last hurley stick in the realm.. However, the game was too much a part of rural life across the British Isles and Ireland to be eradicated..

Like many other rural games,hockey was fashioned into a protosport in nineteenth-century public schools, and in the 1860s the first hockey club was formed at Blackheath in southeast London.. Here, the local rugby club developed a variant of ‘Union Hockey’ which pitted two rampaging fifteen-man teams against each other,

belting a small leather cube – more hacky-sack than hockey ball – with one-handed sticks..

On the other side of London, the more genteel members of Teddington Cricket Club were looking for a winter game.. Adapting their flat-rolled cricket pitch and cricket balls, they devised an eleven-a-side version of hockey which forms the basis of the modern sport, with dribbling, passing, running and positional play. . In 1875, Teddington joined forces with four other south London clubs to create the Hockey Association.. This body set down the first written rules of hockey, introducing the scoring circle and banning high swinging, tripping and charging..

By the early 1890s there were hundreds of clubs across Britain and there were calls for leagues, cups and proper contests..The conservative Hockey Association promptly outlawed them all, to the delight of the editor of Hockey:‘Such a vital decision has undoubtedly saved hockey from disaster and being sacrificed upon the altar of popular, but ruinous competition..’ The edict saved hockey for the upper classes in Britain, but not for long..

Game On: Hockey Basics

Hockey is an eleven-a-side game in which everyone,

goalkeepers included, must carry a wooden stick at all times..The J-shaped sticks are all right-handed, which is tough on the lefties.. One face is flat, the other rounded.. Using the flat side only, the players must pass, push and flick a small hard plastic ball up the field and try to put it in their opponents’ net..

The five key rules are: no using your legs or feet to move the ball (though unintentional deflections are overlooked);no carrying or handling the ball; goalkeepers (of whom more below) may use their limbs and hands inside the defence zone around their goal; there is no offside, so the play is stretched right across the field; you can score only from a shot taken inside the scoring circle.

Tackling is allowed and encouraged.. Players may use their sticks to intercept and take the ball from opponents..

Fouls, Penalties and Set Pieces

A foul is called if a player does the following: plays

the ball with the rounded side of the stick; plays the ball in a dangerous way (too high or at an opponent); uses any part of the body other than the stick to move the ball; raises the stick in an intimidating way; charges, shoves or traps an opponent; deliberately obstructs the movement of the ball or another player; hits, hooks or holds an opponent’s stick, or plays any part in the game

without holding the stick..

The consequence of committing a foul depends on where the offence occurs.. Outside the shooting zone, the other team gets a free hit from where the misdemeanour was committed..The opponents must retreat 5m.. Foul inside the shooting zone or commit an intentional foul in your own 25 yard area and the other team is awarded a penalty corner.. Defenders who deliberately put the ball out of play behind their goals also concede penalty corners..

The most egregious sin is to commit a foul inside the shoot- ing circle against a player in possession who is deemed to have a chance on goal..This is punished by the award of a penalty stroke or flick, taken from a spot 7 yards in front of goal..

Formations

Although high-level hockey is a fluid game, with no

formal positions apart from the goalkeeper, most teams have a basic shape with three lines of players – defence, midfield and forward line..Australian teams of the modern era favour an attacking 2-3-5 formation.. More cautious sides play 4-4-2 or 4-3-3, often with a sweeper behind the back line as an insurance policy..

Special Duties

Like many sports, hockey has acquired a specialised

division of labour. . Players are not just midfielders, but will be defensive or attacking midfielders with specific roles and duties.. Some defenders have a licence to move up the field, others will sit back..

Stick work

The speed, dexterity and creativity of top-class stick

work are joys to behold.. Players at Olympic level have a variety of tricks and moves to evade opponents when dribbling, or to extract themselves from tight marking..

The Penalty Corner

Hockey is a low-scoring sport – many matches will be

won by just one or two goals.. Some will be scored from open play but plenty will come from penalty corners.. It is harder to score from these than from penalties, but easier than from free hits or shots under pressure.. Players will actively look to draw fouls which result in penalty corners..

Hockey Goes to the Olympics

The organisers of the 1900 Paris Olympics asked the

British Hockey Association if they would care to field a team, but were politely declined on the grounds that there would be no international opponents to play.. St Louis in 1904 didn’t even bother to ask.. However, despite the insularity of the Hockey Association, the sport had made its way to the elite athletic clubs of the USA and continental Europe and, at the instigation of the French, a hockey tournament was played at London 1908..The British presence, contrary to usual Olympic practice, was split into the four home nations, in order to make up the numbers with the French and Germans.. England won..Absent again in 1912, hockey returned at Antwerp 1920 – another small affair, won by the English, despite a fiendish ploy by the French team, who invited them to an immense dinner party the night before in the hope of slowing them down..

In the early 1920s the IOC insisted that to qualify for the Games, a sport had to have an international federation with whom they could do business..The Hockey Association in London, which retained copyright over the game’s rules, remained aloof and uninterested, so hockey was off the menu at the 1924 Games.. Finally, a small group of European nations formed an international federation, the FIH, with the tacit permission but not the involvement of the Hockey Association..This was enough to get hockey back into the Games at Amsterdam in 1928, where it was the Indians not the Europeans who turned out to be the masters of the sport..

Hockey had arrived in India via officers of the British army, who were playing at the Calcutta Club as early as 1885..The game

208 HOW TO WATCH THE OLYMPICS

quickly spread to the British, Indian and Anglo-Indian ranks, and was enthusiastically taken up by members of the Indian urban elite working for the imperial administration.. By the beginning of the First World War, there were several teams sponsored by army regiments or by the Indian railways, telegraphs and customs departments..A network of provincial teams and competitions had also been established..

The Indians swept all before them in Amsterdam, winning every game without conceding a goal..They also provided hockey with its first global star, in the person of leading scorer Dhyan Chand.. They won again at Los Angeles in 1932, thrashing the hosts 25-1 with a team described in the local press as ‘.. .. .. like a typhoon out of the east..They trampled under their feet and all but shoved out of the Olympic stadium the eleven players representing the USA..’ In 1936, the Indian team arrived in Berlin with a huge burden of expectation on their shoulders. . Seen as representatives of the simmering nationalist unrest at home, they underlined the feeling by saluting the Indian Congress flag in the dressing room before meeting the hosts in the final..The Germans held them to 1-1 in the first half, but were swept aside in the second as India won its third gold in a row, 8-1..

The subcontinent’s domination of the sport survived partition and independence, with India winning its fourth gold in London in 1948, beating Pakistan 1-0 in the final..This amazing streak was sustained at the next two Games.. Pakistan finally broke the Indian stranglehold in Rome in 1960, a victory celebrated by delirious crowds in Lahore and other Pakistani cities. . India won again in 1964 and Pakistan in 1968, but the great turning point in global hockey came in Munich in 1972, when West Germany beat Pakistan 1-0 to win Europe’s first gold in more than half a century.. The losers did not take it well..The Pakistani players were so incensed by the refereeing of the game that on the final whistle they doused the Belgian president of the FIH with a bucket of water.. Then they refused to wear their medals or face the flags during the medal ceremony..All members of the team were barred from the Olympics as a result, but they miraculously received pardons and reappeared at the 1976 Games..

‘WHERE WERE THE GERMANS?’ THE Olympic MEN’S FINAL, SEOUL,1988

The Pakistanis, however, returned to a changed hockey universe.. The competition at Montreal was played on synthetic turf, as have been all subsequent Olympic tournaments..The south Asian nations, unable and unwilling to spend money on the new pitches, have lagged behind ever since..The 1976 final was played between rising stars from the Antipodes, Australia claiming gold at New Zealand’s expense..The hockey at Moscow 1980 was distorted by the absence of the many leading nations who boycotted the Games in protest at the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan..A scratch team of Soviet-sponsored Zimbabweans won the women’s tournament, while India had a last hurrah in the men’s..

Since then, the golds in both men’s and women’s hockey have been divided amongst the Dutch, Germans and Australians, with two notable exceptions..The Spanish women won miraculously in Barcelona in 1992 and in 1988 Great Britain’s men slew the giants of West Germany by three goals to one..The occasion was bejewelled by the unashamedly partisan TV commentary of the BBC’s Barry Davies..‘Where were the Germans?’ he asked after one British goal,‘ .. .. .. but frankly, who cares?’