I actually suspect they didn’t know. When a sport is played one way for 200 years, you don’t read the rule book to check, you just copy what everyone is doing!
Have to disagree. Even in cricket, I've seen players often get stumped when a rule gets enforced and they had no idea. The 2019 CWC final had multiple such events. An overthrow that hit Ben Stokes and went to the boundary got England six runs when they'd run only two (actually, even by the rules they should've gotten only 5 runs. The umpires made a mistake there). It's something that'd have gotten Ben Stokes out had he done it "intentionally".
I disagree: players rarely know the rules in-depth. A great example is a YouTube video I watched where a Premier League and World Cup referee told the camera that most players didn’t know where they needed to be placed for kick off and that they needed to kick the ball forward. It was so bad that IFAB changed the rules to allow kick off to backpass because it was causing so much conflict at the start of football matches!
Commentators typically know more than players. But in any case, the article quite literally contradicts you. The New Zealand captain believed it to be illegal and the commentator said “you can’t do that,” implying he believed it to be illegal at first.
At the highest levels of the sport, they know the rulebook like the back of their hand.