Traditionally in England, wealthy men, known as "patrons", fund polo teams. In a sport where players are ranked on a handicap system from -2 to 10, most patrons don't get much beyond 1, so they pay top dollar to play alongside the best – up to £250,000 per player for a three-month English season. It is like Roman Abramovich turning out for Chelsea. Like Abramovich, they want the best – and the best polo players, and their mounts, come from Argentina. There are ten 10-goalers in world polo and 16 playing off nine, all of them Argentinians. Of that 26, 24 are in England this summer playing "high-goal" polo, where the aggregate handicaps of the four players in the team have to add up to between 17 and 22 goals. In the case of Apes Hill, Luke and Mark are both rated 7 goals while Morley is one of the best 5-goal players in Europe. Those in the know say that Hitchman is under-handicapped at 3.

No all-English team has won the Gold Cup since the Duke of Edinburgh's Windsor Park amateurs in 1969, although the Tomlinson boys do know what it is like to win polo's top trophy. In 2003, they triumphed with an unfancied Anglo-South African team.

"That team was not as well-backed and mounted as this one," Luke says intensely. "We have to have a chance, but top players can be nothing unless they have top horses, which can cost around £70,000 each," he explains.

Each player in a top team needs perhaps ten horses to play a match of six seven-minute periods, known as chukkas. Players may change mounts twice or more per chukka. Some patrons supply all the horses; the Apes Hill boys buy and breed their own.

"Next to playing it's the most fun. Though you need to be really organised to be successful at this game," says Morley, who has to earn enough from playing fees and breeding to fund a back-up team of five. "Off the field, you spend your year organising and training your horses and going round the world to find mounts to improve your string." The quartet also spend a lot of time brushing up their patron contacts: "If you've had a good season, they come looking for you," says Hitchman, who plays winters in Australia and Barbados. "If not, you have to go hunting around a bit," he adds with English understatement.