Shinty

Shinty () is a team sport played with sticks and a ball. It is played mainly in the Scottish Highlands and among Highland migrants to the major cities of Scotland. The sport was formerly more widespread in Scotland and even played in Northern England into the second half of the 20th centuryShinty in England, pre-1893 , The Sports Historian, 19:2(1999), 43–60 and other areas in the world where Scottish Highlanders migrated.

While comparisons are made with field hockey, the two games have several important differences. In shinty a player is allowed to play the ball in the air and use both sides of the stick. The latter is called a , which is wooden and slanted on both sides. The stick may also be used to block and to tackle, although a player may not come down on an opponent's stick, a practice called hacking. Players may also tackle using the body as long as it is shoulder to shoulder.

The game was derived from the same root as the Irish game of hurling/camogie and the Welsh game of bando, but has developed unique rules and features. These rules are governed by the Camanachd Association. A composite rules shinty–hurling game has been developed in which Scotland and Ireland play annual international matches.

Another sport with common ancestry is bandy, which is played on ice. In Scottish Gaelic the name for bandy is "ice shinty" () and bandy and shinty (and shinney) could be used interchangeably in the English language.

Origins

Hurling, an Irish pastime for at least 2,000 years similar to shinty, is derived from the historic game common to both peoples. Shinty/hurling appears prominently in the legend of Cúchulainn, the Celtic mythology hero.Hugh Dan MacLennan SHINTY'S PLACE AND SPACE IN WORLD The Sports Historian, No. 18, 1 (May 1998), pp. 1-23. A similar game is played on the Isle of Man known as cammag, a name cognate with camanachd. The old form of hurling played in the northern half of Ireland, called "commons", resembled shinty more closely than the standardised form of hurling of today. Like shinty, it was commonly known as and was traditionally played in winter. It is still played regularly on Saint Stephen's Day in St John's.

The origins of the name shinty are uncertain. There is a theory that the name was derived from the cries used in the game; "shin ye", "shin you" and "shin t'ye", other dialect names were shinnins, shinnack, shinnup.Shindy: The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. p.820 chinnup, Alernatively, as Hugh Dan MacLennan proposes, from the Scottish Gaelic . However, there was never one all-encompassing name for the game, as it held different names from glen to glen, including ('play-ball' in English) and in the Scottish Lowlands, where it was formerly referred to as hailes, common/cammon (caman), cammock (from Scottish Gaelic ), knotty, carrick and various other names, as well as the terms still used to refer to it in modern Gaelic, or . Shinty was once a popular game in lowland Scotland, as shown by its name shintie, a term which took that form around 1700, displacing the earlier shinnie – of which there is a written record about 100 years earlier. Shinnie may also derive from shin in English, with the affix -ie, a common termination to the name of many games in Scotland.

Game

Playing area The objective of the game is to play a small ball into a goal, or "hail", erected at the ends of a by pitch. The game is traditionally played on grass, although as of 2009 the sport may be played on artificial turf. The pitch also has marks indicating a area around the goals, the penalty and centre spots (along with their associated arcs/circles of radius), and corner arcs at the corners of the rectangular pitch of radius. The goals, at opposite ends of the field, measure wide and high and a net is affixed to catch the ball when a goal is scored.

Ball The ball is a hard solid sphere of around half the diameter of a tennis ball, consisting of a cork core covered by two pieces of leather stitched together. The seam is raised. It is very similar to a hurling sliotar in that it resembles an American baseball with more pronounced stitching. The permitted circumference is between and weight between . The ball is usually white, but there is no statutory colour with black being a common colour for Kyles Athletic.

Plastic balls or soft balls are often used in youth competitions such as the variant "First Shinty".

Stick The ball is played using a caman, which is a stick about long with two slanted faces. The stick has a wedge shaped head, roughly triangular in cross section, which must be able to pass through a ring in diameter. Unlike the Irish camán, it has no blade. The caman is traditionally made of wood, traditionally ash but now more commonly hickory, and must not have any plate or metal attached to it. The caman would be made from any piece of wood with a hook in it, hence caman, from the Scottish and Irish Gaelic word cam, meaning bent or crooked. It can also be called a stick or club. The slant of the face will vary according to the position that the stick is used for. It can be made according to the player's height.

Plastic camans are common in the youth variant "First Shinty".

Rules of play

A player can play the ball in the air and is allowed to use both sides of the stick. The stick may also be used to block and to tackle, although a player may not bring their stick down on an opponent's stick, which is defined as hacking. A player may tackle an opponent using the body as long as it is shoulder-to-shoulder as in association football (soccer).

A player may only stop the ball with the stick, the chest, two feet together or one foot on the ground. Only the goalkeeper may use his hands, but only with an open palm since he is not allowed to catch it. Playing the ball with the head constitutes a foul whether intentional or not, as it is considered dangerous play. Other examples of dangerous play, which will be penalised, are a player, while grounded, playing the ball, or a player recklessly swinging the caman in the air in a way which might endanger another player.

Fouls are penalised by a free-hit, which is indirect unless the foul is committed in the penalty area, commonly referred to as "The D". This results in a penalty hit from .Rules of Play and Playing Season , Camanachd Association - Rules and Byelaws, February 2010

A ball played by a team over the opposing bye line results in a goal hit from the edge of the D, while a ball played by a team over their own line results in a corner. A ball hit over the sideline results in a shy: a shinty shy involves the taker tossing the ball above his head and hitting the ball with the shaft of the caman, and the ball must be directly overhead when struck.

Scoring The winner of a game is the team that scores the most goals. A team scores a goal "when the whole of the ball has passed over the goal-line and under the cross-bar". A goal can only be scored with the caman; there is no goal when the ball "has been kicked, carried or propelled by hand or arm by a player of the attacking side." A goal cannot be scored directly from a free-hit.

Team size Teams consist of 12 players (men) or 10 players (women), including a goalkeeper. A match is played over two halves of 45 minutes. With the exception of the goalkeeper, no player is allowed to play the ball with his hands. There are also variants with smaller sides, with some adjustments in the field size and duration of play.

Substitutions

As with sports such as football, shinty originally did not have substitutes. These were introduced in the 1960s, progressively expanding to allow a maximum of three substitutions per game. As of 2011, a rule change allowed for rolling substitutions to be made at the senior level.

Organisation

In common with many sports, shinty became formalised in the Victorian Era and the first organised clubs were established in cities such as Glasgow and London where there were thousands of Gaels resident.

In 1887, a historic game was played between Glenurquhart Shinty Club and Strathglass Shinty Club in Inverness. This game was attended by thousands of people and was a major milestone in developing a set of common rules. This fixture was to be repeated on 12 January 2007 in Inverness as the opening centrepiece of the Highland 2007 celebrations in Scotland, but was postponed due to a waterlogged pitch.

The modern sport is governed by the Camanachd Association (). The association came into being in the late Victorian era as a means of formulating common rules to unite the various different codes and rules which differed between neighbouring glens. Its first meeting was held in Kingussie in 1893.

The Camanachd Association maintained its initial structure for much of its first century. The 'Future of Shinty' Report published in 1981 led to a complete restructuring of the way in which shinty was organised and managed. That led to the move away from a dependence on volunteers to govern the sport, to the Association's first salaried employees.

Competitions

There are shinty clubs in Aberdeen, Aberdour (Fife), Edinburgh, Glasgow, Perth, Cornwall, Oxford and even London. University Shinty is a popular section of the sport, with almost all Scotland's main universities possessing a team. Historically, Glasgow University, Aberdeen University and Edinburgh University have vied for supremacy, but in recent years, Strathclyde University, Robert Gordon University, Dundee University, and the University of St. Andrews have risen to prominence. Clubs compete in various competitions, both cup and league, on a national and also North/South basis. While the top Premier Division has been played on a Scotland-wide basis since 1996, with a second National tier added in 1999, folding in 2006 before being reinstated in 2014, whilst the lower 2 leagues are based on geography. Many clubs run second teams that also compete in these leagues against clubs with only one senior side.

Season

Shinty was traditionally played through the winter, based around the tradition of the "Iomain Challainn", where New Year was marked by a game between neighbouring parishes. The summer was left free for seasonal work and friendly tournaments. The Winter season always ran over, however, and many teams would find themselves finishing the previous season only weeks before the next one would start.

In 2003, shinty clubs voted for a trial period of two years of a summer season from March to October, with a view to moving permanently to summer shinty if the experiment was judged to be a success. Despite opposition from the "Big Two", Kingussie Camanachd and Newtonmore Camanachd Club, and other small groups in the game, an Extraordinary General Meeting in November 2005 voted by an overwhelming majority (well over the required two thirds) to make summer shinty the basis upon which the game would proceed.

There have been teething problems since the move to summer shinty, with a couple of teams being culpable for the season running over into November and December. Season 2010 saw the league season finished by the first weekend in October, almost on schedule.

Shinty does still get played during the winter, in University Shinty which has teams compete for the second most valuable trophy in Scottish sport – the Littlejohn Vase – and in New Year fixtures, the most prestigious of which is the Lovat Cup, played between Beauly Shinty Club and Lovat Shinty Club.

Leagues

For more information, see Shinty league system