1011. Obstruction Appreciation Society Special Commendations

The corruption of the terms used in the Rules of Hockey Obstruction Rule has been going on for decades. It began with the Interpretation of "must move away" in 1993, because there was no indication of how or why a player who had received the ball had to move away with it - just that he had to do so. The attempt to correct this situation made it worse, the word 'must' being replaced by 'may', so we had "a player may move away" - which is neither directive nor prohibitive, in fact not an instruction at all. Because of this change the Obstruction Rule was effectively dead by 1998. The modern version is "is permitted to move off in any direction except .... the part after EXCEPT generally being utterly ignored.

I have spoken with the Umpire Coach on several occasions, he readily admits that what he is coaching is not Rule compliant, but insists that if he does not coach in this way players and umpires in his country will be disadvantaged when it comes to International selection and play, because the way he is coaching is the way that is practiced and 'accepted' among FIH Umpires. This is why such corruption thrives - we have good sincere people trying to compete with outright cheats and given no choice but to copy them because the FIH have not acted to curb the cheating (the wayward 'interpretation').

Picture from Field Hockey. Com 5th April. 2023.