I see. Is India playing in this tournament? What's the level of the sport in India...All I know is that most of the Mughal kings, Afghan Kings and central Asians used to play this game.
There is no chance of any Indian, let alone an Indian team, playing in this tournament, which is a pity. I know that Army teams used to play each other even twenty years ago.
The level of the sport was good, and is slowly improving after a dry period after the 70s for perhaps 30 or 40 years. During that time, the game was kept alive by the Army; 61st Cavalry is kept as an entirely horse-mounted regiment even today, the PBG plays, the NDA and IMA have teams, and there are polo grounds in Hyderabad and Bangalore where the Army still plays. I don't know the level of the Army game these days, but I do know that civilian members of the proliferating private polo clubs play a useful 4 or 5 goals.
Indian polo was good until the 60s and 70s; in 1957, HH Jaipur, Rao Raja Hanut Singh, the Rao Raja's son, Kunwar Bijay Singh and Col. Thakur Kishen Singh won the Deauville Gold Cup, and both Jodhpur and Jaipur swept the English polo season more than once. The towering figure of Indian polo until he retired was Rao Raja Hanut Singh, a descendant of the Jodhpur house, the son of Sir Pertaub Singh (Sir Pratap Singh, as he would be called today). Among the greats, I've watched HH Jaipur, Hanut himself, Bijay, Hari (the younger son), Col. Thakur Kishen Singh, Col. Alec Harper, Prem Singh, I think Abhey Singh (Hanut's half-brother), V. P. Singh, 'Billy' Sodhi and 'Pickles' Sodhi. Among the foreigners, I've watched Julian Hipwood, Howard Hipwood, Eduardo Moore; I've also watched Prince Philip in an exhibition match. The most electrifying match I've watched featured a Pakistani, Brig. 'Hesky' Baig; he played for Calcutta Polo Club, with Prem Singh, Alec Harper and one other, against the unconquerable Ratanada Wanderers (Hanut, Bijay, Hari and Abhey), and won!
This is about Rao Raja Hanut Singh, possibly the greatest of his generation, who was instantly raised to 9 goals after leading Jodhpur to victory in the 1921 Prince of Wales final (he couldn't be 10 goals because he wasn't a Maharaja; in India, this mattered, in the UK, Australia and US, and later the Argentine, it didn't). I've met him as a small boy, and watched him and his family team lose to a scratch team of Maharaj (not Maharaja) Prem Singh, Col. Alec Harper, Brig. Hesky Baig and one other, whose name I forget across the distance of these 56 years.
There are mistakes in the account the URL to which I have pasted below; the British didn't take the game from the high Himalayas, where it was played extensively around the turn of the 19th century (Shandur remains), but from the Indian State of Manipur. The finalists in 1921 were not two Rajput states, they were Jodhpur and Patiala and Patiala was a Sikh state, not a Rajput one (Jaipur's day was much, much later, in the 30s, and that state was never as big as Jodhpur or Alwar or Patiala in polo). Kashmir later also had a very good team, but mainly 'hired assassins'.
