Balls and stick s of every conceiv- able pattern were used, with balls ranging from inflated India rubber to tennis balls

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The Cheshire Polo Club, with grounds in Little Budworth, just north of Tarpoley, claims its antiquity to 1872.29 In fact, the club is the result of a merge fifa 15 ultimate team coins among three other clubs: Man- chester, founded in that year, Wirral, which dates back to 1885, and Bowdon, where play had started in 1891. Manchester and Bowdon joined in 1906 with grounds at Ashley, retaining the name Manchester as the senior club. In 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II, the club moved to Little Budworth and took the name Mid-Cheshire Polo Club, retaining the traditional scarlet and white colors. Cheshire Polo Club was established in 1951 and remains a powerful force in the area, being the home of the Junior County Cup, a provincial trophy dating back to 1905. Another old trophy is the Cheshire Champion Cup, presented to the Liverpool Polo Club in 1911 by its women members.

Nearby, Chester Polo Club, started in 1881 by Lord Arthur Grosvenor, played their matches at the Rodee, the public grounds in the walled city of Chester, where there is a race course. The club was revived by Alfred Tyrer in 1895, but fell into abeyance. A new Chester club was formed in 2005. Most appropriately, the home ground is on the Rodee track .

The universities also had polo clubs: Oxford, founded in 1874 by Walter Hume Long , later Viscount Long of Wrexhall, and Cambridge a year earlier, established by the Hon. John Fitzwilliam. The Inter-University polo match first took place in 1878, the Dark Blues taking the honors.

Between 1870 and 1890, the game made slow progress. Balls and stick s of every conceiv- able pattern were used, with balls ranging from inflated India rubber to tennis balls. At the beginning, it was no more than a scrum or a maul — to use rugby terms — which slowly evolved into a slow, dribbling game. It was the time of five-a-side players, snaffle bridles and blink- ers, docked tails and no martingales. The increased use of the backhander stroke, as devised by John Watson, changed it into a faster galloping game, in which the celebrated Sussex County team of the brothers Arthur, James Earnest “Johnnie” and Alfred “The Boy” Peat reigned supreme from 1879 until 1893. Along their many years of almost unbroken success, the Peat brothers were helped by players such as James Babington, Edward Baldock, Henry Ashton Case, Gerald Hardy, Thomas Pinchard Kempson, Thomas Kennedy, the Earl of Lewes, Sir Francis Mildmay, Sir Algernon Pey ton, Geoffrey Phipps-Hornby, Sr., and their brother- in-law, Edward Kenyon Stow. In 1894, playing with the Earl of Harrington, then in his fifti- eth year, Sussex was defeated 4–3 in the Hurlingham Champion Cup final. The Peats’ ponies had been trained to be changed every time the ball went out of play, when time out was called for one minute. When the rule was modified that year, their ponies could not keep up the pace and Sussex lost in overtime to the Freebooters, among whom was their old teammate Gerald Hardy, who scored the seventh and winning tally. The Peat brothers then sold their ponies and did not appear on a polo ground again.