KEY POINTS:
The best team sports mix power and subtlety. Soccer and basketball do it to perfection. Rugby, league and union, go close, with overdosing on the power keeping them in the second tier. Netball is in the same bracket, only for the opposite reason. The 'no contact' rules damp the power part down.
The Olympics have tossed up a sport dripping subtlety, and its loaded with power, bullet-like speed, and that which drove the Cold War nuclear arms race; the assurance that if anyone starts trouble everyone has the weaponry to stop it.
It's hockey.
Everyone's seen it on suburban grounds, although it went big on artificial turf. You know the story. It's got goals, sticks with the curved bit at the end, more or less the same rules as soccer, minus Offside, and the corners carry massively greater importance.
Until now I'd thought it was all 'Jolly Hockey Sticks' and 'Well done there Simpkins', with the occasional flashy sub-continental showing the ruddy-cheeked ones how its done.
Forget that.
While hockey is about skill, and talent, and fitness, and the usual sports yada, yada, yada, something else runs under it.
Watching the New Zealand men give it to Korea, 3-1 last night, one thought bashed in. 'This is seriously violent.'
That's a cricket-type ball out there. They whip it around, at, and through each other at terrifying speed. If someone is between the ball and the goal they're getting lumps, or worse.
The goalkeepers are the only ones to pad up. Defensive teams do wear facemasks for the penalty corners, knowing they face a ball arriving at speeds making a fast bowler sob with envy.
The instant the sequence is over the facemasks come off. Protection is for wusses. It's back to taking their chances with the whistling ball.
This makes hockey, at least in spirit, something close to the running of the bulls at Pamplona, only there's no convenient alley for escape.
Hockey players have to stand and take it like a man.
Unless they are women hockey players, in which case it's exactly the same thing.
Don't mess with hockey players. These people have overcome fear. It makes them dangerous.
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