Field hockey

Source: Wikipedia. Pages: 37. Chapters: Goalkeeper, Field hockey stick, Penalty card, History of field hockey, Indoor field hockey, Penalty corner, Drag flick, Minkey, Umpire, Offside, Indian dribble, Chamois grip. Excerpt: In field hockey, each player carries a stick and cannot take part in the game without it. The stick is usually between 36" and 38" long (but this is not defined or restricted) and traditionally made of wood but now almost all the more expensive sticks are composite, that is made of a number of materials. They usually contain a combination of fibreglass, aramid fiber and carbon fibre in varying proportions according to the characteristics (flexibility; stiffness; resistance to impact and abrasion) required. Although the exact origin of field hockey remains unknown, historians have recorded a number of 4,000-year-old drawings found in the tomb at Beni-Hasen in the Nile Valley (Egypt) which showed men playing the sport. Throughout the following centuries, variations of the game were played by a spectrum of cultures ranging from Greeks and Romans to Ethiopians, Indians and Aztecs. In most of these cultures a single wooden stick with a curved end, probably a sapling or a suitable tree branch, immediately available, was used rather than a purpose 'manufactured' sports item. Finally after centuries of different variations of hockey, (including a version in England, sometime prior to 1860, in which. because of the very hilly heathland area in which it was played, a rubber cube and not a ball was used,) the game became more organised and regularised. By 1886, when an association of clubs was formed and the game became more standardised, the modern game as we know it began (and a white painted cricket ball had become the standard object to play with). The game had also by this time divided into various branches which developed as separate sports. Shinty, a game popular in Scotland, uses both sides of a round stick with a curved end, which is shaped in a similar way to a walking stick; the Irish game, hurling, uses both sides of a stick which is flat on both sides and shaped somewhat like bill-hook with an axe-like handle. The stick in England, possibly because of the close as