Chucked in the deep end

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Photos: Jack Western

My eyeballs feel like someone has been scraping at them with wire wool, my nose is running with a current worthy of most rivers and I think I have half the elements of the periodic table gurgling around inside my stomach.

I thought trying out water polo would be a bit of a laugh; a chance to chuck a ball around for a while whilst getting to try out the new York Sport Village pool for the first time. I also thought I’d be pretty good at it – I can throw, I can swim, how hard can it be? Turns out very – this sport is pretty brutal, and that’s coming from someone who’s being playing rugby for the last 10 years.

Contrary to what I thought beforehand, water polo is much more than swimming and throwing a ball about. It is not a sport you can try once and have any real success with, but with the club in full training for their first BUCS match of term coming up in a few weeks’ time they had no choice but to literally throw me in at the deep end.

Within an hour, I was involved in a full-blown training match, and found myself standing in goal with 12 men in silly hats and tight speedos swimming very fast towards me. Me in my flowery swim shorts looking like I was off for a casual day trip to Scarborough. I felt like I was starring in some pathetically tame and yet equally scarring remake of Piranha 3D, and I didn’t even have Kelly Brook there to comfort me.

So far I’ve made water polo out to be an altogether horrific and unwelcome experience. This isn’t actually the case however – I did enjoy my hour and a half’s time with the club, and my only regret is chowing down on a pretty hefty chicken stir-fry so soon before making the splash.

We started off with a few gentle lengths, which reminded me how long it had been since I’d actually gone for a proper swim outside of the standard frolicking about in the pool on holiday. Fitness on land and in the water are two quite different things, and whilst I’m normally very active and go to the gym five or six times a week, when the pace got cranked up I found it tough to keep up.

After half an hour of lengths I couldn’t wait to get out of the pool and have a bit of a rest, but no, rest for this club constitutes treading water in the deep end and practicing ‘eggbeater’. This basically consists of kicking each leg individually in a breaststroke style in order to keep yourself level in the water, rather than bobbing up and down like a fishing float or an apple at Halloween. I found the whole movement to be quite unnatural, and still hadn’t really got the hang of it by the end of the session.

We then went on to a drill of which the aim was to beat your marker and allow yourself to swim free into some space to receive a pass. I was paired with the team captain who, like the rest of the club, was extremely friendly and did his best to try and help me fit in. Meanwhile, I did my best to avoid looking like a tit. For the record, he was far more successful than I was.

He taught me the importance of keeping your body as flat as possible on the water, as this gives you the strongest possible body position in water polo when grappling an opponent. Once I had learnt how to spin round my opposite man, my next task was to receive a pass in front of goal and try and score. Every time I went to catch the ball however, I either slapped in pathetically just in front of my own nose or started sinking and missed the ball all together.

Clearly then, I was ready to play a match… I started out in goal, thankfully in the shallow end, and only had one save to make in my 10 minutes between the sticks. A shot came pretty much straight at me from a few yards out, and I palmed it expertly into my own net to allow the opposing team to score.

I was even less successful when I moved out into the open pool. Apart from making a few passes, I was pretty much clueless. With so much going on it’s very difficult to keep track of your marker, and I was definitely at fault for a couple of goals. My crowning moment however came in a literal sense, when, as I was swimming up pitch, the ball cannoned off the back of my head and out of play, much to the amusement of everyone else.

Whilst I found water polo difficult and I was unashamedly pretty rubbish at it, it is definitely a great sport to get involved with. You have to appreciate the fitness of these guys who play week in week out, and the one piece of advice I would give to anyone thinking about going along to give it a try is this: bring goggles!