Prompted by seeing who's playing who at the Hockey World Cup, taking place now in India, I got thinking. Amongst all major sports, hockey's development and relative popularity seems the most interesting, in respect of where it is played?
At first glance it looks like it is one of your standard "commonwealth" sports, played to a world level by Britain, Australia, NZ, SA, India, Pakistan and Canada. All but the latter are test-playing cricket nations, so the temptation is to assume that hockey and cricket kind of spread hand-in-hand, back in the day.
But then how to explain the presence of Holland and Germany as two of the perenially best Hockey-playing nations (Germany are multi-time world champions) as well as Spain, Argentina and Korea? Argentina have adopted Rugby, as well as hockey, but there's no discernible evidence of a French hockey team.
Why have the Germans and Dutch taken to hockey with such gusto, but never cricket or rugby? I know the Dutch have recently enjoyed a bit of success in cricket, but that has been a new phenomenon, not really underpinned by any history.
And Korea, and Spain? Did they simply have "hockey development programmes" linked to their hosting of (and hence entry into) Olympic Games in 1988 and 1992 that have kind of just carried on into modern success?
At first glance it looks like it is one of your standard "commonwealth" sports, played to a world level by Britain, Australia, NZ, SA, India, Pakistan and Canada. All but the latter are test-playing cricket nations, so the temptation is to assume that hockey and cricket kind of spread hand-in-hand, back in the day.
But then how to explain the presence of Holland and Germany as two of the perenially best Hockey-playing nations (Germany are multi-time world champions) as well as Spain, Argentina and Korea? Argentina have adopted Rugby, as well as hockey, but there's no discernible evidence of a French hockey team.
Why have the Germans and Dutch taken to hockey with such gusto, but never cricket or rugby? I know the Dutch have recently enjoyed a bit of success in cricket, but that has been a new phenomenon, not really underpinned by any history.
And Korea, and Spain? Did they simply have "hockey development programmes" linked to their hosting of (and hence entry into) Olympic Games in 1988 and 1992 that have kind of just carried on into modern success?
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