Archive for May, 2010

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 »