Page "Field hockey" Paragraph 28

One important difference in modern field hockey is the absence of an offside rule.

This allows attackers ( often a lone attacker ) to play well up the pitch, stretching the opponents ' defence and using the large spaces to be found there.

To counter this, defences usually keep a matching number of defenders near those attackers.

This can frequently lead to formations such as 1 – 4 – 4 – 1 which is an adaptation of 4 – 4 – 2.