B is for Beer the staple of the polo community. Preferred tipple of the young, the Antipodean, the Irishmen and the strongest thing I have ever seen 99.9% of Argentine players drink. It is easily transportable and chilled as long as you plan ahead and is about the only alcoholic drink that a bloke can drink out of the receptacle he bought it in and not get funny looks or worse still, looks of pity. Have you ever seen real man drinking Alcopops from the bottle?! I rest my case.

Beer is therefore the perfect tipple for pitch side drinking and served properly chilled, offers both post match refreshment and rehydration. I have drunk beer pitch side with Kings, Princes, Maharajahs, magnates, moguls all the way through to truckers, rabbit catchers,, sheepshearers, tractor drivers and even, when forced to, with accountants and solicitors. No polo career is complete unless you have stood around the barrel that they cut in half at Waimai Polo Club, New Zealand about 60 years ago. It is religiously filled with ice and beer every day before chukkas and when polo is over the players stand around it until it is fully depleted or the moment comes when even the thirstiest club members are struggling with vertical hold issues and cannot really make out the barrel anymore, as the light has got so bad.

It was beer, or more precisely losing against the Master speed drinking it, that led to the University student drivers at the Dutch Open Polo, having to drop their trousers and do a lap of the plaza while accompanied by a massed chorus of “down trousers round the square tra la la la la. “ (To the tune of Boney M’s classic “Brown Girl in the Rain”). It was only the combination of the glasses shattering around their ankles as they ran, a driver dropping his underwear as well as his trousers (hence earning him the nickname Dead Partridge) and a police raid, which caused mass flight to a nightclub and a move onto the “shorts”. The fact that some grooms and a truck driver only woke up the next morning when the German border police on the train asked to see their passports and they should have been on the ferry already with the ponies, was definitely not the beers fault. As a rule polo gatherings as long as they stick to the beer normally pass without too much incident, it is what is drunk later that causes the real problems, of which more to follow.