Bushell's Best Bits - Everything You Needed To Know About The World's Craziest Sports. Mike Bushell

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СКАЧАТЬ and children, the crowd started to scatter with panic, saving whatever they could. But just as I was about to be the flake in a 99, my majestic mount averted any carnage by banking around to the right. He took us back to the horse boxes, where he could replace me with a proper polo player. He had given the crowd a glimpse of what he was having to put up with, and we were both relieved when we swapped partners.

      I spent the rest of the match on a retired grey who loved the fact that I didn’t have the conviction to get him out of a walk, and we gently turned in the middle as the action stormed past us like a tornado. Play whizzed past one way, and then by the time we’d turned our bewildered heads, the whirlwind came back in the other direction.

      What I did see close up was how physical top polo can be. It’s no wonder it has been described as rugby on horseback. There is another sport which fits that description and has similarities with basketball, and that’s Horseball, and a date with the British team is pencilled in for the future. As for polo, don’t be fooled by the chink of champagne glasses and polite country chatter. This is raw, physical and played at a thunderous pace. The sight of thoroughbred juggernauts putting on the emergency brakes and turning on a few blades of grass, while potentially colliding with others doing the same, is spine tingling. They reach 40 miles per hour as the high-speed scrums flow from one end of the pitch to the other.

      It’s no surprise that the top polo players have to be like gladiators, because the roots of this sport are in war. Alexander the Great is quoted as saying that he represented the stick, while the ball was the world he intended to conquer.

      There’s doubt over when polo actually started, with different sources claiming there was a game played by Persians in the 5th century BC, and in China even earlier. The word polo comes from the Tibetan word ‘pulu’, which means ball. According to the website Indiapolo.com, it seems that at first, polo was a way of training mounted troops for battle, with as many as 100 on each side. It became the national sport of India under the Mughal dynasty until the end of the 16th century, and India has often been seen as the home of the modern game. By 1870 it had spread throughout British India, where serving army officers and high ranking officials had ponies to hand. As word got around, one officer who’d read about the game in a magazine tried to set up a game with walking sticks and billiard balls. Needless to say he didn’t get very far. Thankfully if you go to a match today, the balls and sticks are much more sophisticated and the players have the skills to match.

      Even after a few lessons, my full polo debut had ended in personal humiliation. I like to think I played a crucial midfield holding role on my grey though, because our team, led by the talented Kenny Jones, won the tournament. It seems the drummer is a wizard whatever shape of stick he’s holding. I could and should have ended my polo career with my head held high, but then a version of the sport came along that really does enable relative beginners like me to get involved without any danger of putting ice cream vans out of business.

      ARENA POLO

      If you thought polo was out of reach, well ‘Arena’ is doing what five-a-side has done for football and making it much more accessible. It’s on a much smaller pitch, 300 by 150 feet, and there are high walls all around, so your horse can’t gallop off out of control. The balls are bigger and softer and if you do fall, you are guaranteed a soft landing because instead of grass, it’s played on rubbery mulch.

      ‘You can see the ground is nice and soft,’ Phillip Meadows of the Royal Berkshire Polo Club assured me, ‘and you feel safer and more comfortable in that protected environment. It’s when you take people outside onto the full hard grass pitches that they tense up.’

      He was right. I joined a game with another novice polo player – Nathaniel Parker, the actor, who I had met on the set of Merlin. He is very experienced on horses and does most of the riding himself when filming. He’s also a huge racing fan, but this was the first time he had been on a polo pony.

      ‘This is so different. It’s forward, back, left and right, and these horses are so well trained they know more about it than we do. I was out there and I had missed the ball, and the horse was thinking “ah, he’s done it again”, so he turned around and went back to get it,’ he remarked.

      It’s true, the arena polo ponies do all the work which is why beginners are able to trot around and get involved after listening to just a few instructions. Indeed after five minutes on the pitch I had forgotten about being on a horse and my main frustration was timing and trying to get to the ball before Nat and his team had smashed it up the other end.

      At the top level, arena polo keeps the professional players active during the winter months when the grass pitches are unplayable. England captain James Morrison reckons it’s more physical than the summer game, because all the action is squeezed into a much smaller, enclosed area. ‘It’s more intense and I certainly get a lot more injuries in the winter when playing indoors,’ he said.

      Once a year, arena polo is now played in the O2. I took part in a media match there and once again in the comfort of an enclosed, soft pitched arena, my lack of riding experience wasn’t to matter. The pony did all hard bits, cantering up and down while I clung on, trying to enjoy the ride and attempting to get the ball to teammate Kenny Logan, who proved if you can play rugby for your country, you can also cut it in a polo match.

      So polo has come within reach. You no longer need your own horse or equipment to swing the mallet these days, and get a taste of the rumble of hooves and smack of ball. It’s become a popular corporate or experience day for a group of mates. Even so, a session won’t leave you much change from £100, but that’s still peanuts compared to the price of some of the four-legged stars of this sport.

      For information and to give it a go and for all your polo needs, its www.hpa-polo.co.uk

      POLO CROSSE

      Arena polo got me involved in the cut and thrust of this fast and furious sport, but it’s fair to say that my time with the ball had been restricted to the odd touch. However, there is a polo game in which you can pick up the ball and run away with it. It was developed in Australia in the 1930s and is called Polocrosse. To get an understanding of this hybrid game, we first need to turn our attention to one of North America’s first team sports, lacrosse.

      I admit, that at first I had images of genteel jolly hockey sticks when I turned up for an introduction with some of the country’s top female players at Berkhamsted School. I thought it would be a bit of a run around, throwing and catching the ball with my stick and its net on the end. How wrong could I be. My ignorance didn’t last long and was quickly punished as they put me in the goal to show me the frenetic pace and aggression in this sport. Like a village thief in the stocks I was pelted with balls as they got in some target practice.

      Out on the field, as sticks clashed and leaping bodies charged, I could see how this game originated from the American Indians, who used it to prepare for battle just like the early polo players.

      In those days, perhaps as far back as the 16th century, the Cherokees called the sport ‘the little brother of war’ because it was seen as such effective military training. Sometimes there were hundreds, even thousands of players on a team, and the goals could be miles apart. It’s no surprise then that a game could last several days. Imagine how long you could go without seeing the ball – so most players got bored and engaged in stick battles with their opponents while they were waiting. There are also reports that early on they used a human skull rather than a ball.

      Originally the game was called ‘Baggataway’ or ‘Tewaraathon’, and over the centuries it was scaled down to 15 players on a team, with the goals 120 feet apart.

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