Field hockey has no offside-style mechanism that rewards direct, low-possession counter-attacking the way football sometimes does — the flat, fast surface and stick-handling skill required mean sustained possession is almost always the more reliable route to creating chances, which is why possession percentage correlates unusually strongly with shots and corners won compared to some other team sports.

This is also part of why "circular running" — an attacker with the ball running around the outside of the circle without a genuine attempt to move goalward, purely to run down the clock or draw a foul — is specifically penalized by umpires: unchecked, it would let a team convert territorial possession into time-wasting rather than genuine goal-scoring pressure, undermining exactly what possession is supposed to translate into.