It’s a dream you may be familiar with: Scotland are in the World Cup final as defending champions. Victory will clinch their third World Cup on the spin, and you’re kitted up on the bench with a real possibility of coming on as supersub. But, somehow, something doesn’t quite seem right.

The team is on the pitch attacking the ball, going for goal, but it’s eerily calm. There’s a tape playing a Strathspey reel, but no Tartan Army, and I can’t smell spilt McEwan’s anywhere. Nobody is belting out the national anthem (Flower of Scotland) or its modern football equivalent (concerning the sexual proclivities of Posh Spice). And there, in the middle of the pitch, is a herd of elephants being ridden by men in tight breeches and loud shirts.

Well, there’d be no game without them. It’s the Elephant Polo World Cup and, along with curling, it’s one of the few sports Scotland still dominates, so much so that in this year’s competition, marking the 25th anniversary of the sport, Scotland has two teams flying the Saltire. A World Cup win may be an impossible footy dream, but the odds for elephant polo have just narrowed.

On a grassy airfield on the edge of Nepal’s Royal Chitwan National Park, this year’s contestants are gathered around their team tents: canvas and bamboo pavilions straight from the set of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum. There’s the Hon Jamie Douglas and his wife, assorted members of the St Moritz Cresta Club, a handful of Ghurka officers and veterans, a Mongolian contingent and a lady GP from Edinburgh’s New Town. The bad news is that Torquhil Campbell, the 13th Duke of Argyll and Scottish captain, has cried off, and the team has been left rudderless.

As they limber up and pick pith helmets, the pachyderm herd emerges through the morning mist and begins charging back and forth across the field as the team captains sort them into big, small, fast and slow. It’s one of the defining moments of the tournament, when team tactics are decided, Jim Long, a veteran of the main Scottish team, sponsored by the distiller Chivas Regal, explains.

“The captain could decide to pick the faster, smaller elephants, rack up the goals and tire out the elephants in the first chukka, then swap them for the big, slower ones to defend his lead in the second,” says Long. “That way, the opposition are left with tired-out elephants to get back into the game with.”

Each team has four elephants, four mahouts (Nepalese elephant- riders, who sit on the neck of the beast steering and driving it with their bare feet and a wooden stick), and four players, wielding 12ft bamboo polo sticks.

Why they bother is not at all clear. Apart from a gaggle of poor village children around the field, selling coloured drawings of tigers and elephants, there’s no fan base. Hardly anyone back home is aware of Scotland’s domination of this tricky sport, and the issue of television rights has yet to rear its head. Chivas sponsors the sport as part of its campaign to associate its whisky with inspiring adventure sports in exotic locations.

To the outside observer, the game looks very much like a pilot for another off-the-wall Channel 4 reality show, or a toffs’ jungle piss-up with elephants thrown in. But that’s quite wrong, insists James Manclark, the Haddington-based adventurer, former British Olympic bobsleigh team member and international equestrian polo player.

The players are ferociously competitive. Everybody wants the best elephants and everyone wants to win, he says.

Manclark revived the game — originally played by Indian princes and British colonials at the turn of the 20th century — 25 years ago, when he met Jim Edwards, owner of the Tiger Tops Lodge resort in Nepal, at St Moritz’s Cresta Run. At a dinner to promote the resort, Manclark discovered that Edwards kept a herd of elephants to take tourists on tiger- and rhinotracking safaris in the Chitwan park. “So I said to him, ‘We’ve got to play polo.’ I left for Japan for a horse polo match, but I sent him a telegram, saying, ‘Arrive April 1, have elephants ready.’ And he did. He didn’t know whether we were serious, but we were.”

Today, he says he and Edwards are as serious as ever, and are discussing plans for elephant polo to be part of the next Asian Games. The sport is registered as an Olympic event in Nepal, and Special Olympics officials are exploring whether the game can be harnessed for athletes with disabilities.

“It’s not just a toffs’ piss-up,” says Manclark. “People do party hard, but on the field it’s bloody serious. I didn’t sleep last night because I was worried about being beaten by the girls’ team.”

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