Introducing Handball...and Errr Hockey!

HANDBALL is a game of two teams, each team with seven players where these players play ball with their hand, passing, throwing, catching and also dribbling with only their hands, no kicking!! and goals are scored by throwing the ball inside the goal posts. The handball goal posts is similar to a football posts only smaller, about the same dimension to indoor football. The game has two halves, 30 minutes each with a 10 minute break in between. Anyway, full description of the game is available at the International Handball Federation website


I'm arising an issue with myself posting this information about handball as I never did with hockey. Thats not fair I told myself..it is not not fair! Hence....


HOCKEY has been played since a long time ago, similar games were believed to be played back in the roman and greek era. But in modern days, it started as early as 1900's where in 1906, it was first introduced in the Olympics Game. There used to be two hockey federation, one for men and another for female but the two later merged and Fédération Internationale de Hockey sur Gazon was established. Posh ehy the name. Hockey are played on artifical turf which is sprayed with water to make the surface wet. This will enable a better control on the ball and to ensure the ball to roll on the surface. Indoor hockey are played indoor with similar rules and equipments. There is a rumour of the existence of under-water hockey but not sure how true that is.

Hockey is a ball game played with a stick that is controlled by the player to maneuver the ball, only using the flat side of the stick. The other side i.e. back side is a no no in hockey or else you could get yourself a green card just like no.5 did hahahaha. Anyway, there are different skills you can do with just a stick and a ball...seriously banar! Hehehe! There many ways of delivering the ball i.e tap, sweep, slap, hit, flick etc. and there is also different ways of hitting the ball such as the conventional flat side hit, reverse stick and so on. See, hockey is a very interesting game. It is also a thinking game and even after so many years of training you can never master all the skills unless you train every hour every day. Thing is, each player would have a skill that they well-mastered so because of this, one team can have a varieties of skillful players each according to their own position. However, to master these skills, the basic skills are usually affected. A drag flicker for example needed more time of her training on drag flicking than team play. So her basic skills and team play may be affected due to her drag flicking skills. So a drag flick specialist may be weak in basic skills like tackling and dribbling. Hayden Shaw said something about this so I'm not making this up. Haha! Further more, Unlike football where any good kickers can take penalty kicks in hockey, the penalty flick has to be done with certain criteria instead of just hitting the ball in. And to do excel in penalty flick taking, one has to spend many many hours just to be 100% effective in penalty flicks.

Unlike football, it consists of two 35-minutes halves with 15 minutes half time break. The pitch dimension are a few meters smaller than that of football. Two teams, each with 11 players, one goalie and 10 field players, play against each other and the team with most goals win. And yes...nothing is more euphoric that listening to the crisp sound of a ball hitting the backboard. Daym! hockey is a hot game! :)

My imagination is running wild.....................