Field Hockey Stick - Head Length

Head Length

In the upper left corner of the picture of the press there is a small insert showing the kind of head bend these presses were originally designed to produce. That stick is circa 1962/3. Near the lower right of the picture and unfortunately, cut off, is a view of the typical 'horseshoe' shape bending produced by the machine. A heavy cast iron staple was hammered across the ends while (while the timber is still in the press) and the piece was further restrained by a flexible steel strap, then removed from the press and allowed to dry out and 'set' for a few days before cutting (It is the steel strap that causes the black stain so often seen on the base of the head of 'one piece' hockey sticks, it is caused by a reaction between the acids in the timber and the oxidising of the strap). This particular machine was modified to run from an electric motor, but it was originally hand operated and probably dates from a time before electricity was available (or reliable) in that part of Pakistan (Sialkot - an industrial town in the province of Punjab). The boss in the centre would also have been modified to produce the tighter head bends required at the time this photograph was taken (February 1989)

The first major developments to what was later termed the 'English style' stick (and the method of play with such sticks) occurred in India. (The game in its modern form was apparently brought to India by the British Army, although there does not appear to be any specific evidence of this. But certainly hockey was played by the British forces in India). At that time the stickhead was very long (in excess of 12" - 300mm) and made from an indigenous British timber, ash. The Indians then produced sticks with a much shorter head length and a tighter heel bend and used mulberry, which is tougher than ash, but has similar bending characteristics and weight and is easy to work. This development changed the nature of the game, led to the 'Indian dribble' and to Indian dominance of the game in the first half of the twentieth century.

A hockey stick is occasionally used in the vertical position shown, but manipulating the movement and the direction of the ball in a controlled way (dribbling) is carried out in what is termed a 'dribbling crouch', when the handle of the stick will usually be angled between 35° and 55°. Hitting or pushing the ball can be done with the stick at any angle between the vertical and horizontal and recent changes to the rules allow even the edges of the stick to be used to sweep or strike at the ball on the ground. The various stick head designs can be compared in respect of how, with the handle at an angle of 45°, they differ in the carrying out of the 'Indian dribble' i.e. controlling the direction of the ball by rotating the stick head over the top/front of the ball rather than (or as well as) around the back of the ball (the English style dribble). The multi-layered stick head diagram indicates the changes in head shape and length that occurred over thirty years or so.

The earliest trend was in shortening the stick head. While that reduced the stopping area of the head it was beneficial because, according to the rules at the time, only one side of the stick head could be used (at that time the ball could not be played with the 'edges' of the head or handle but with the flat side -or face side- only).

Using extreme examples is useful as a means of demonstrating effects that occur in less extreme configurations but are much more difficult to spot and therefore to explain. The first observation is an easy one. Top left. If the stick head is rotated onto the reverse (lighter colour) the Toe is not going to disappear into the ground to enable the reverse side of the stick to be presented to the ball - a vertical adjustment is necessary. Secondly, (top right) if the handle of the stick is kept at exactly the same angle and rotated, a horizontal adjustment is necessary to bring the reversed head to a position where contact will be made with the ball. The third figure (bottom left) shows these adjustments having been made (and a change to the angle of the handle because the position of the hand holding the stick at the top would be about the same as it is when gripping the stick in the forehand position), but the area of stickhead making contact with the ball is very small; so control may not be adequate. The fourth figure (bottom right) demonstrates that to get good contact with the ball on a larger area of the reversed head, it is necessary to move the handle much nearer to the vertical. This means the player must bring the ball in very close to the feet and come to a more upright dribbling position - this in turn impairs the ability to scan the pitch and keep the ball in peripheral vision at the same time - a considerable disadvantage when dribbling to evade opponents.

So, although the long head stick was an adequate shape for a dribbling style which was based on moving the ball forward from directly behind the ball; and changes of direction could be achieved by rotating the stick around the back of the ball and/or moving the feet to either side of the ball, it was not so easy to use the long stickhead to bring the ball across the feet and back again, particularly when it was placed wide to the left of the feet of the player. (This left side position was compounded in difficulty with a very severe interpretation of ‘obstruction’, which prohibited shielding of the ball from an opponent. The game was also, at the time, seen as 'right-sided' and positioning the body between the ball and a close or closing opponent, approaching from the right hand side, was not allowed.) Reversed stick hitting, pushing and flicking would be short range skills and difficult to do accurately, if at all, especially when moving at speed.

Gradually over many years stickheads were made shorter and the 'heel' was made to a tighter bend. This process continued until the 'one piece' head could not be made to a sharper bend without the timber splitting out on the base. As it was, attempts to have the grain follow entirely the same curve as the bend, as it should for maximum strength (this is why the timber is bent rather than cut to shape) were abandoned by some producers and an upturn to the 'toe' was sometimes achieved by cutting across the wood-grain at the ‘toe’ end of the ‘head’ to achieve the desired shape. Some manufacturers resorted to gluing a separate piece of wood on top of the 'toe' or glued additional strips of timber to the inner edge of the handle above the head to get the effect of a tighter ‘heel’ bend.(‘Head adjustment’ frequently happened to 'update' old style stock or where unmodified presses were in use).

Some players were cutting part of the toe off their sticks, to achieve a shorter head, and rounding the end off,(although on the older styles this did nothing to tighten the bend to the 'heel' and often just ruined the stick). Predictably, there were sticks produced for the 1986 World Cup with heads with a horizontal length of only 95mm. The International players to whom they were handed out, tried them and then returned them as unusable.

The difficulty was twofold: 1) The 'toe' was so short that it could not be rotated completely over the top circumference of the ball and 2) When the stickhead was played around the back of the ball it 'ran off', because there was insufficient 'run length' to the stickhead. If, for example, a player ‘propped’ the ball while moving in a dribbling crouch (putting the stickhead over the front of the ball), drew the ball back towards his feet and then took the stickhead around the back of the ball to bring it forward again, perhaps moving the ball off in another direction (a common movement), the margin for error was so small that the ball could easily slip off the stickhead. The ultra-short stickhead was to some extent based on the idea that the new artificial surfaces would lead to a style of hockey based on stopping the ball with the handle of the stick near horizontal to the ground and that dribbling to elude opponents would be almost eliminated with near continuous passing of the ball. Although there was a development of 'system hockey' that overcame the stick/ball skill deficiencies of the Europeans compared with India and Pakistan at the time, it was not as fluid as the kind of one and two touch passing game common in soccer and that 'ideal' was (and still is) a long way off.