Spectator Life

My late father, who was the kindest man I have ever encountered, introduced me to horse racing when I was a small boy. Although he died all of 33 years ago, I still remember his advice to me when betting on the world’s most famous horse race: ‘The best form for the Grand National is… the Grand National.’ He was convinced that very few horses were capable of both jumping the unique Aintree brush fences and truly staying the marathon trip, which is now 4 miles 2 and a half furlongs. So he concentrated his bets on horses that had done well in the race the year before. A few trainers seem to share my father’s thinking because the first three home a year ago all return once again tomorrow (5.15 p.m.

Fans of long-form sport, rejoice. April is here, and it is our month. Not only does it see the first four-day matches of the county cricket season, it’s also when snooker stages its world championship. Long-form sport is always the best. A four-day cricket match (five for Tests) has way more scope for drama than a T20. And the snooker at the Crucible Theatre in Sheffield, where even the shortest match is the best of 19 frames, gives space for the twists and turns that characterise true sporting excitement. Both games have sought to recruit new fans in recent years by offering shortened versions. Cricket has gone from 50-over games to 20 and now ten (with the 100-ball version in there as well).

The new flat season and the Pertemps Network Lincoln at Doncaster (tomorrow 3.35 p.m.) will dominate the racing pages this weekend, and rightly so. The bookmakers have the correct horses at the head of the market for the Lincoln: two improving four-year-olds, Al Mubhir and Awaal, but both at cramped odds. I largely stay clear of betting on the flat for the first month of the season because it is hard to know which horses are fit and which are not after their winter break. If I was forced to have a bet, it would be an each-way play, many places, on Charlie Fellowes’s Atrium, another four-year-old improver who has won his last two races and will love the soft ground. A course and distance winner, Atrium is priced at around 12-1 which looks fair.

One of the keys to successful ante-post betting it to choose horses whose trainers are skilled at targeting big races. If you lead a horse to the well too many times, the well will eventually run dry. The trainers who pick up the biggest prizes season after season know that they can only get any one horse to peak form for two, perhaps three, big races in any given calendar year. It is for this reason that I have huge admiration for the talents of two men who share a trainer’s licence for the first time this season. That respect is not simply built on the fact that last week Oliver Greenall and Josh Guerriero provided me with a winning tip at the Cheltenham Festival: Iroko put up at 9-1 to win the last race on the final day.

If it feels like this column is appearing far more regularly than usual, that’s because it is. Normally a Friday-only offering, there have been four daily previews for the Cheltenham Festival and now this one to make it five columns in as many days. It’s been tough going finding winners this week but we got there in the end (Iroko tipped at 9-1 in the 5.30pm today). Today we return to a more standard weekend fare, and I have a strong fancy for the big race of the weekend. I put up two horses last week for the Boulton Group Midlands Grand National at Uttoxeter (3pm) last weekend and they have both been declared and are now trading much shorter than seven days ago.

Boodles Cheltenham Gold Cup day is almost upon us and the rain-softened ground means the distance of 3 miles 2 furlongs plus will not be for the faint of heart or for those horses whose stamina is in doubt. In the Grade 1 feature race tomorrow (3.30pm), the favourite Galopin Des Champs oozes class but he is not guaranteed to stay the trip, especially in these conditions. In contrast, both Noble Yeats, last year’s Grand National winner, and Stattler, last year’s winner of the National Hunt Challenge Cup, will relish a stamina test but may not have the class required to win this championship contest. I put up two horses for the race all of two months ago.

The rain continues to fall at Cheltenham and so it is vital to look for horses that like soft ground on day three of the Festival tomorrow. Equine talent that needs the ground similar to the terrain of the M25 to show their best form might as well stay in their stables. One horse that could not have it wet enough is DASHEL DRASHER in the Grade 1 Paddy Power Stayers’ Hurdle (3.30pm). At first glance, his chances look easy to dismiss: he is ten years old and from an unfashionable Somerset yard with a little-known jockey taking on the biggest stables in Britain and Ireland. However, if Dashel Drasher, trained by the capable Jeremy Scott and ridden by the improving Rex Dingle, can get into a nice rhythm at the front of the field, he could definitely outrun his odds.

Few people enjoy the thrill of a winning punt more than me but there are times when betting becomes (almost) irrelevant. Tomorrow at 3.30 p.m. will be one of them. That’s when seven runners will line up for the Unibet Champion Hurdle, the first championship race of this week’s four-day Cheltenham Festival. I will be at the course to see what I expect to be a hurdling masterclass from Constitution Hill, Nicky Henderson’s vastly-talented six-year-old gelding and the odds-on favourite for the Grade 1 showpiece. To date his racecourse record is flawless: five wins from five races including victory in the Sky Bet Supreme Novices’ Hurdle at this meeting a year ago. Then he was heavily eased at the finish, yet still won by 22 lengths or more from the rest of the field.

With the start of the Cheltenham Festival just four days away, I am pleased to say that this column’s antepost book for the meeting is looking decidedly healthy. It can all go badly wrong, of course, over the space of four days but, for now at least, let’s live in hope. Over the past couple of months, I have put up 12 Festival bets and, particularly for the first two days, most of those horses are now being offered at significantly shorter odds by all bookmakers. With more rain falling than was expected this week – and with more to come – this will inevitably suit some horses that I have tipped better than others. However, that’s the ups – and downs – of betting several weeks in advance.

Trainer Sandy Thomson has long had a knack of improving experienced horses that are moved to his yard. A combination of the healthy Scottish Borders air and a new regime have done wonders for several veteran chasers over the years, including Harry The Viking, Yorkhill and Dingo Dollar. The secret? ‘Individual care. It’s all about trying to work out as quickly as possible what each horse wants. Every horse is different,’ the genial Thomson told me last year. This season a stay at Thomson’s yard has led to a marked improvement in the form of BENSON, a hurdler with plenty of miles on the clock when connections paid just £7,000 for him as a seven-year-old gelding last year.

If there is one trainer I think might have a memorable Cheltenham for the ‘home team’ in the face of stiff competition from Ireland, it is Harry Fry. The Dorset handler looks as if he has kept some of his best horses fresh and well with the hope of landing a couple of big prizes next month. If the betting market is a guide, then Fry’s best hope of a winner comes in the shape of Love Envoi, who will try to win Close Brothers Mares’ Hurdle on the opening day. This seven-year-old mare is a course specialist having won the 19-runner Ryanair Mares’ Novices’ Hurdle at the Festival last year. However, this year’s Mares’ Hurdle is ultra-competitive with both Honeysuckle and Epatante likely to line up.

Friends Oliver Greenall and Josh Guerriero have made a flying start to their new training partnership this season. Both names are on the licence but they have different roles: Greenall is the face of the duo at the racetrack, entertaining owners including several from the many syndicates that are linked to the yard, while Guerriero prefers to concentrate on training the horses and planning where they will run. It is a case of so far so good for the Cheshire stable as they have had 46 winners this season from 250 runners at a strike rate of 18 per cent (that’s before this afternoon’s racing). Their record for the past two weeks is five wins from 19 runners at an even more impressive strike rate of 26 per cent.

I make no apologies for the fact that over the next month I will spend a lot of time looking forward to what I regard as Britain’s finest annual sporting event: the Cheltenham Festival. Yes, there will be groans from racegoers that Guinness is a rip-off at £7.50 a pint; yes, it can get overcrowded even if you pay more than £100 for a club enclosure ticket; yes, the Willie Mullins and Gordon Elliott-trained horses will win more than their ‘fair share’ of the big races. But the sheer quality of the racing, the exhilarating atmosphere and the beautiful setting of the course nestled beneath Cleeve Hill are all a joy to behold. Yet, as a punter, the enjoyment of the racing is always greatly enhanced by… a big-priced winner or two.

On a cold Tuesday night, as the wind whipped in from the North Sea, I joined 220 hardy souls to watch a game of football. Less than a mile away from the Sizewell nuclear plant on the Suffolk coast but light years away from the lurid lights of the Premiership, Leiston FC were playing Ilkeston Town in the Pitching In Southern League – Premier Division Central. As the old joke goes, the attendance was so small it would have been easier to name the crowd changes than the team changes. Welcome to non-league football – in this case the seventh tier of the game’s pyramid system of promotion and relegation.

One of the nicest parts about writing this weekly column for Spectator Life is the informed comments that greet it each week from readers. I am thinking specifically about people such as ‘Simian Leer’, ‘Oswald Grimes’ and ‘Simon’. This week my thanks go to ‘Simian’, who in late December highlighted the chances of NASSALAM in the Paddy Power New Year’s Day Handicap Chase. Nassalam finished a staying-on third that day and ‘Simian’ later posted a second comment asking whether the Ultima Handicap Chase might be a good Festival target for Gary Moore’s six-year-old gelding. The astute reader seemed convinced a step up in trip to more than three miles would suit the horse.

If you think the Calcutta Cup is just any old rugby match between England and Scotland, then the latest in BT Sport’s fine series of documentaries should put you straight. It’s called The Grudge and is about the 1990 Calcutta Cup, the climax to the Five Nations with everything at stake for the first and only time: the Grand Slam, the Triple Crown, the Championship and the Cup itself. The film is narrated by the actor Robert Carlyle, so not entirely unsympathetic to the men of Scotland. Craig Chalmers, looking slightly less boyish these days, chews the fat with Peter Winterbottom, who still looks like someone you wouldn’t relish packing down against. Flanker John Jeffrey sits on his Land Rover on his Borders farmland reminiscing while an amiable cow wanders by.

Many of my best bets over the years have been placed after watching replays of past races, looking out for horses that fared well despite bad luck in running. I have rewatched last year’s Fulke Walwyn Kim Muir Challenge Cup Handicap Chase several times and there is no doubt that MISTER COFFEY was a desperately unlucky loser at the Cheltenham Festival. The gelding lost several lengths when he was badly hampered by a faller as early as the second fence. He lost all momentum and position so, all in all, he did superbly under a lovely ride from Sam Waley-Cohen, to be second to Chambard, beaten just two and a half lengths.

Irish trainer John 'Shark' Hanlon recently asked whether he was mad to think his horse Hewick could win the Boodles Cheltenham Gold Cup. Since the colourful Irishman has never had a runner in the Gold Cup and since the horse in question cost around £800, there was almost certainly a resounding reply from both sides of the Irish Sea: ‘Yes, you are totally bonkers.' I would be very surprised if the likes of Willie Mullins, Gordon Elliott, Henry de Bromhead and Paul Nicholls are quaking in their boots at the prospect of taking on Hanlon’s improving handicapper on St Patrick’s Day (17 March). But I am not so sure that the affable Irish handler is at all crazy to think that Hewick does have a real chance of lifting this season’s premier title at the Festival.

Something is happening here, and you do know what it is, don’t you Mr Jones? Stargazers – and even some more grounded folk – reckon it’s written in the heavens: that the team Eddie Jones was supposed to have been coaching will meet the team he will be coaching in the rugby world cup final on Saturday 28 October in the Stade de France in Paris. Jones, jilted last month after a seven-year relationship with England, the team he was preparing for the tournament that starts in France on 8 September, has this week been welcomed back into the arms of his former flame, Australia (also the nation of his birth), with whom he enjoyed a four-year partnership from 2001-5.

Ground conditions at both Warwick and Kempton Park are likely to decide the winners of the two big weekend handicaps tomorrow. A month ago, clerks of the course and groundsmen up and down the country feared it might never rain again. Now it seems to pour almost every day and, as a result, it is essential to back horses that revel in the mud. The big race at Warwick tomorrow is the Wigley Group Classic Handicap Chase (3 p.m.) over a marathon trip of 3 miles 5 furlongs. With the going already ‘heavy, soft in places’ and with more rain forecast, only gritty battlers who can handle the ground are going to play a hand in the finish.