The average sports follower finds it difficult to understand underwater hockey.
It remains a mystery to me.
I watched the Masters Games final between the Bashers and the Hackers from the underwater viewing platform at Moana Pool and from poolside.
It is a game played with small sticks with players wearing large flippers that allow the shorter team members to stand on tiptoe at the deep end and have their heads sticking out of the water.
It is an eerie world under the surface with a mass of bodies floating like weightless space walkers.
The six players in each side chase a small puck that rests on the bottom and attempt to get it into a goal.
When you look through the viewing platform all you see are arms and legs floating in the ether.
If they come too close to the viewing window you cannot see anything.
It is a quiet world punctuated by spasmodic bursts of energy that send bubbles to the surface.
When the buzzer rings the water is churned up.
It is like a feeding frenzy when small fish compete for a tasty morsel or when fish panic when a shark attack looms.
There is a mass of bodies scrambling to get control of the elusive puck as they swoop down from the surface to the bottom of the pool.
They play 10-minute spells with a two-minute half-time break.
The Bashers squad of Matt Dick, Sean Aldridge, Phil Bremner, Gail Brownlie, Bevan White, Rob Feist, John Smeaton and George Armstrong beat Chris Meeks' Hackers 5-3 to win the gold medal.
