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Stay tuned! We have some commited new contributers that should be providing comment and editorial on the 2013 season!

…and plenty of it! Unlike other baser sports where they tend to spray it in all directions we pour it carefully into the Cup and DRINK IT. Whether it is because they like the respect that we polo players show for their product or the image is right but polo and champagne walk hand in hand and Thirstyboy for one has never had a problem with it.
At its most obvious, here in the UK, Veuve Cliquot have sponsored the Cowdray Park Gold Cup for many years and made it one of their events of the season. Having enjoyed their hospitality on several occasions I have to say that there is something about good polo and a great setting that after a really good lunch makes Veuve Cliquot the only drink that matters.
Pommery won the Gold Cup and being involved with the team I was able to sample their product on a pleasingly regular basis and can tell you that in the moment of victory nothing could have tasted finer.
In fact after a hard fought match preferably played under a hot sun I do not care where you are or whether it is vintage or not, properly chilled it is the only victor’s tipple. Shot myself in the eye once in my rush to get it open. Blind for a few minutes but the champagne bought back my eyesight in due course, so its restorative powers are sans pareil.
Alexandre Ebeid always used to celebrate his Gold Cup wins in Deauville with Lalou. Starting at the stables the victory procession wound its way through the town and ended up at Chez Mioque. Far too much of it was spilt and sprayed for my liking but there was always enough of it to quench even my thirst so no complaints from me. I even discovered a case of it one memorable evening when after supper at the swank local hostelry we ventured out to the Good Knight club in Haslemere and of course delighted at my discovery Alex insisted we drank it all. Staying locally would have been a blessing that night but with one eyed closed I had to return to Berkshire to deliver a young lady home well after curfew. Clandestine visits thereafter I am sad to recount .
On a polo trip to Japan I met my denoument in a cascade of Dom Perignon. The company had most kindly stood on as main sponsor and a fair proportion of that was in product. Torrential rain had turned the pitch into two small pitches joined by an small causeway around the half way line but the show went on and the assembled thousands of guests had a fantastic day. Some serious consumption of the sponsor’s product ensued and the bus ride home amongst other horrors included a well known player jumping out of the window onto a neighbouring car and whipping it furiously to try and clear the traffic jam. It was a sad end to an epoch really and even I with my legendary thirst have not been able to enjoy one of the finest Marques in the same way from that day forwards.

In Ellerstina, at Bauti’s, in Dubai, Hong Kong and all points east they gathered around computer screens and watched the Queens Cup final LIVE. Sure there were some teething problems particularly dropping the signal a few times and with the sound early on however all in all it was an amazing success and must be the way forward. Imagine in the days leading up to Christmas being able to watch polo live from Argentina, what a treat. Hopefully the boys from Pololine will be able to develope their skills and see their amazing initiative through to its logical conclusion. Polo on TV is fine but what all true aficionados want to see is the whole game and preferably live, this way they can.
(I will try and get the Tech Wizard to tell you how to hook the computer up to the TV in layman’s terms as it is even better like that)

It started off as a cracking match but whilst it maintained tension on the scoreboard the quality of play dropped and it became scrappy and slow. I did not share many people’s view of the semi-finals of the semi-finals which despite the fact that the outcomes became clear quite early on did include some great passages of play and some great individual performances. Young Mackenzie was outstanding against Lechuza just ask Miguel Novillo. The chukka where the 4 “10@s” each scored a length of the ground goal of immense skill in the Dubai/La Bamba game was unbelievable. I do not thin that anything we saw in the final matched that and Cambiaso got it done. I did not stay for the Press Conference but I do hope someone asked him what went through his head when they went a goal down in the last chukka. If they did the answer was that he was not worried and that he felt he would just have to score two! Which he did the first finding a seem that no one else would have found through the massed ranks in front of him that were trying to block his progress and the second straight from the subsequent lineout. The only slight worry if I was backing Dubai to do the double is that he was on two borrowed ponies in that chukka (one of which won champion pony) and that neither are available in the Gold Cup as their owners are playing it as well.

Far fewer teams than the Gold Cup but people want to call it a failure? I think not. It has always been regarded as less important than the Gold Cup this is nothing new. The Vestey’s in their pomp as Stowell Park used to play it under an alias (Foxcote) and use it to get the ponies fit ,a bit like the Open Teams in Argentina still use Tortugas and Hurlingham. They however do have their traditions and place in the order of things as does the Queens Cup. They have the pomp and ceremony, location, the Queen and many other things beside. What they do not have are the grounds. This however could be fixed in the next year or two and their reliance on private grounds could be reduced to a position where it becomes an option as opposed to a necessity. Whichever way you look at it the “visiting team” on a private ground always feels at a disadvantage, whether they are or not.

Okay so it is NOT a new rule as Paul Withers was at pains to point out yesterday but a stricter interpretation of existing ones. He also said that when we played together for England I never turned for his backhands. I was too busy ducking!!

So far so good I think is my analysis of developments so far. I have conducted an exhaustive survey of at least 4 people and they are all in agreement that it has opened up play. Kim Richardson from Knepp Castle told me that the first Club 2 Goal was like lightning and that he was lucky his ponies were fitter than him. The old lags whom have played a good level of polo, including High Goal and have been around polo collectively for nearly a century (only 3 of them!) say the same. Everyone expressed their concerns about consistency of interpretation but as I pointed out, there has to be time allowed for the median to be reached.

From my own point of view I have two things to say. Firstly I love watching some of the pros in the Low Goal to whom turning the ball has almost become a reflex. Will he, won’t he? He does go and do it again and lets off a wail of despair, brilliant entertainment! Even when they do not turn, they get in such a muddle that they end up missing a lot. Hard to be in two minds, when the only one you have got does not function brilliantly? Anyway they cannot help it and I think in a funny way do not realise they are doing it half the time. As someone far less couth than me said it is a bit the same with some of their other habits, appealing, stabbing people in the back, scratching their privates, cheating etc.

On a more serious note the contact between players and the blocking of players seems to have increased. At times it has become quite forceful and at times even a bit desperate. Now, however, instead of it happening to the trailing player trying to join up when a team is attacking, it is happening to attacking players who are possibly in a position to ride the line on a player in defence, who may wish to turn the ball. As usual the umpires focus is naturally more drawn to the play of the ball area and some of these trailing fouls or unnecessary roughness penalties are being missed. It is an age old problem but for a different reason and officials need to be vigilant.

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.

A is for………
A is a good place to start this alphabetical guide to refreshment for the Poloholic and it also stands for abstention. Just thought I would get the worst bit out of the way first! If you are serious about your polo career and wish to make sure that you are bright eyed and busy tailed every morning of the week then abstention is perhaps the path to follow. I do have to say,, however that you will be missing out on what the Kiwis, for example, reckon is 90% of the game. Namely “having a few beers afterwards and telling lies to your friends”. Not literally, of course, figuratively. How well they played, how well their ponies went, what a great goal they scored, all the things that you need to tell them so that they get to the most important bit…telling you how good you are/were. Do not make the mistake of just walking into the bar and telling everyone that you are a legend such as never before seen. This blatant self-promotion just proves counter-productive, what you need is others promoting you or who you can say are, at very least. Then the spin starts to kick in and the legend to grow. None of this is going to happen if you sit at home nibbling on a couple of lettuce leaves and sipping herbal tea. You need to get among the people, eat a bit of half cooked meat and wash it down with something that will dilute the grease a bit. Polo is the sport where the after-party can be better attended that the game itself. It IS the sport of the after-party and I can almost claim to have invented them. So follow me on my journey and see where you stand in the all-time rankings. Are you beer-monster or shandy-pants, by the time the end of the alphabet is reached you will have a good idea? If your power of reasoning has gone by then or you are too trashed to care you can always start again at AA. (Not to do with cars you idiot, aa help group for the over-imbibed!)

Atilio writes in his comment on Silly Season about what he sees as perhaps an unholy plot to make sure that no one born below the equator wins any more polo matches in the UK or possibly more correctly, he sees too much time spent endlessly rewriting rules when most often it is bad interpretation and weak enforcement that causes the problems?

Whichever way it is A. the irony is that since you wrote your comments the AAP, governing body of Argentine polo, have wielded the BIG STICK. In an attempt to cut out turning of the ball, “2 man trains” and any tactical innovation that has come into the game since the late eighties, they have legislated and BIG TIME. The USPA have followed suit and now we are doing so here in the UK. Feverish rounds of Umpire Meetings at all levels lasting well into the night and once again it will all come down to the enforcement. I believe that in the US Open they were even blowing people for turning left? I have not seen any film yet or spoken to many players who participated but would not surprise me. Anyway watch this space.

Nick Walter wrote of his boredom at the High Goal in reply to Silly Season and as you can see above they are trying to open it up but the proof will be in the pudding. Skill levels have changed and the legislators themselves never possessed skills anywhere approaching these levels. So they cannot really conceptualise how today’s players might adapt or mutate their play to the circumvent the legislature this time. My pitch-side reporter at the US Open (only a 5 goaler but skilled in his own right) reported that Adolfito just did as he pleased and played turning the ball just as much as usual but within the new rules and parameters. Play deeper-anticipate more? They have to hit backhands too?!

The first 12 goal tournament started at Cowdray this weekend and Guards had their first internal 15 Goal Match. The big 2 have swung into action as usual with I believe 10 teams at Cowdray in the 12 and 6 teams at Guards in the 15. While the other supposed larger clubs are struggling to generate much internal action over 8 goal level and will probably have to rely on outside entries to their HPA tournaments at the 12 and 15 levels, the question arises as to whether all the other clubs are just points of entry or has the proliferation of registered clubs that we have seen over the last few tears diluted the available resource in the same way that has happened with the lesser number of people that play in the arena? Read the rest of this entry »