Spectator Life

Boris Johnson didn't like Adolescence. In his Daily Mail column last week he acknowledged the fine acting of the most talked-about television programme of the year, but still concluded that it was ‘tosh’. The problem, he felt, was that it wasn't based on a real-life crime, which somehow lessens its worth as a lesson for our times in the eyes of the former Prime Minister. I'm not sure his logic fully holds up to scrutiny (nor, for that matter, does Keir Starmer's plan to show Adolescence in schools). But if it is real-life drama that Boris wants then Netflix, with impeccable timing, this week released another one of those sports documentaries at which they have become rather adept.

Tomorrow’s Coral Scottish Grand National (3.35 p.m.) has attracted a field of 23 runners with a pot of more than £112,000 to the connections of the winner. Irish trainer Willie Mullins, fresh from his stunning achievements at Aintree last weekend, has six runners in the race as he tries to become champion trainer in Britain for a second successive year. It's impossible to rule out another Mullins victory but the bookies are running scared of his horses and the forecast favourite, Chosen Witness, looks to be particularly poor value. I have put up two horses for the race with mixed fortunes so far. Magna Sam, suggested each way at 50-1, is running and is now a top-priced 20-1.

Tomorrow’s Randox Grand National (4 p.m.), the world’s most famous horse race, is the highlight of an excellent card at Aintree and I think the bookies have got it right with the horses they have put at the top of the market. Stumptown, who could yet go off as favourite, is the best weighted horse in the race given that he would be given several pounds more if the handicapper was allowed to take his recent Cheltenham Festival win into consideration. His victory by seven lengths in the Glenfarclas Cross Country Chase came, however, after the weights were published and this is a race in which there are no winning penalties.

How do you walk away from greatness? How do you vacate the position of being literally the best person in the world at something? Most of us never have to face this challenge, but at some point Ronnie O’Sullivan will. In Steve Davis and Stephen Hendry he has contrasting examples of how to tackle it. I’d argue that Davis’s approach is by far the better – and indeed teaches all of us about life and the way it should be lived. ‘If he plays his best, he wins. It’s as simple as that.’ There aren’t many who disagree with Hendry’s verdict on O’Sullivan, his successor as the king of snooker and the greatest player, by common consent, ever to pick up a cue.

A small but perfectly formed training outfit from Gloucestershire has quietly been making ripples, bordering on waves, with its horses in recent weeks – and there is plenty to look forward to for the rest of the season too. David Killahena and Graeme McPherson, who hold a joint licence to train at Stow-on-the Wold, sent just one horse to the Cheltenham Festival earlier this month and Yellow Car ran a cracker to finish fourth in the Grade 1, 20-runner Albert Bartlett Novices’ Hurdle over three miles. ‘I bought him as a cheap and cheerful three-year-old to have a bit of fun with and for two years he showed nothing at home,’ McPherson told me. ‘But then I ran him in a point to point and the jockey got off and said, “He’s all right”.

It is ten years since Sepp Blatter finally lost control of football’s world governing body, Fifa. But despite his retirement and advanced years – he has just celebrated his 89th birthday – Blatter has not been able to bow out quietly. In a few days, on Tuesday, Blatter will be in court, in Basel, in his native Switzerland, to hear verdicts on allegations of fraud. Last month, Blatter spoke to protest his innocence in this case: ‘When you talk about falsehoods, lies and deception, that’s not me… That didn’t exist in my whole life.’ However, this picture of purity is one few football fans would recognise. Because Blatter is a villain of the old school, an inveterate chancer, an oleaginous schemer, a proper wrong ’un.

As regular readers will know, I am a great admirer of the training talents of Harry Derham and I have no doubt that he will reach the top in his chosen profession. This month he reached a significant landmark, training the 100th winner of his career. Derham, aged just 30 and the nephew of 14-times champion National Hunt trainer Paul Nicholls, certainly has his string in sparkling form at present with six winners from just 18 runs over the past two weeks for an impressive strike rate of 33 per cent. All the signs are that he is a man to follow in the final weeks of the jump season. Tomorrow his horse NORN IRON looks to have a strong chance at Newbury in the Get Best Odds Guaranteed At BetVictor Novices' Handicap Hurdle (2.05 p.m.).

There have been plenty of upsets in the Grade 1 contests on the first three days of the Cheltenham Festival but supporters of Galopin Des Champs will be hoping that trend comes to an end today when this talented nine-year-old gelding goes for a rare hat-trick of wins in the Boodles Cheltenham Gold Cup (4 p.m.) The Willie Mullins-trained and Paul Townend-ridden 9-year-old gelding needs to defeat eight rivals in order to land a first prize for connections of £364,000. In truth, he would want the ground to be softer but the chances are that this odd-on shot will still land the spoils. A convincing victory today would mean that Galopin Des Champs will inevitably be compared with the legendary Arkle, who won three consecutive runnings of the race from 1964 to 1966.

If the ground was riding really soft today, I would not be opposing Teahupoo in the Paddy Power Stayers’ Hurdle (4 p.m.) but the going is officially ‘good to soft’ this morning and it will dry further throughout the day. On that terrain, I would rather be on Teahupoo’s stable mate THE WALLPARK who has won four of his last five starts. His most recent outing was when he was fourth to another of today’s runners, Crambo, at Ascot just after Christmas. Since then he has been kept fresh by Irish trainer Gordon Elliott with this Grade 1, worth more than £180,000 to winning connections, in mind. At seven years old, The Wallpark should be at his peak and he should thrive on the quick surface.

Jonbon is the odds-on favourite for the big race on day two of the Festival, the BetMGM Queen Mother Champion Chase (4 p.m.). He is the most likely winner but there is little doubt that this Cotswolds venue is not his favourite racetrack and so I am happy to take him on. Eight runners are due to line up and so that makes each-way betting is attractive. I expect the outsider of the field, Libberty Hunter, to outrun his odds but I would be surprised if he is good enough to win this Grade 1 contest on ground that is faster than ideal for this soft-ground performer. I would rather concentrate on the form of Solness and MARINE NATIONALE, first and second in the Grade 1 Ladbrokes Dublin Chase at Leopardstown.

The Grade 1 Unibet Champion Hurdle (4 p.m.) is the highlight of the first day of the Cheltenham Festival this afternoon. There appears to be growing confidence behind the Irish challenger Brighterdaysahead after her demolition of a decent field at Leopardstown late in December. Trainer Gordon Elliott’s exciting six-year-old mare has a career record of seven wins from eight runs, her only defeat coming a year ago at the hands of Golden Ace, who is also in today’s field of just seven runners. However, both talented mares will probably be running for place money if – admittedly a big if – Constitution Hill really is back to the form he showed when winning the Champion Hurdle in a near-canter two years ago.

The annual running of the Betfair Imperial Cup Handicap Hurdle at Sandown means that the start of the Cheltenham Festival is only three days away. As usual though, tomorrow’s race (2.25 p.m.) is a noteworthy event in its own right: a competitive affair with 17 runners due to line up for a contest worth more than £51,000 to winning connections. Traditionally, too, this is a race that some trainers – notably Martin Pipe in years gone by – had been plotting to win for some time before sending their horse on to the County Hurdle at Cheltenham six days later. These trainers were, as some still are, in search of two lots of winning prize money and a tasty bonus – now restored to £100,000 – for victory in both the Imperial Cup and a Festival contest.

The ground will play a key role in the outcome of the big race at Kelso tomorrow, the bet365 Morebattle Hurdle (3.30 p.m.) worth nearly £62,000 to winning connections. The going description is currently 'good to soft, soft in places' but with a day and a half of winter sunshine forecast it could well be nearer to 'good' ground by the off. I certainly hope that is the case because the two horses I am backing both like fast ground. My number one fancy is Alan King’s FAVOUR AND FORTUNE, whose fine run when fourth to the impossibly well-handicapped Joyeuse can be marked up as he was inconvenienced by the soft ground at Newbury in the William Hill Hurdle.

The first months of the year are a tough time to inhabit this corner of the planet. First there’s January to contend with – darker than Himmler’s sock drawer and full to the rafters with post-festive self-flagellation. Then we’re into February, which is just more of the same: January by another name. No wonder the powers-that-be decided to shave a few days off it. Fortunately, salvation has arrived – as it does every year, just when we were nearing breaking point amid the relentlessness of winter. I write, of course, of the Six Nations, a great sporting festival devoted to genial national rivalry and daytime binge-drinking in equal double measures.

The entries for the Cheltenham Festival handicaps races were announced this week and so now seems a good time to try to steal a little value from bookmakers, with the four days of elite jump racing just around the corner next month. We still don’t yet know the weights that each horse has been allotted for these races but, in most cases, that’s fairly easy to predict given that official ratings for every horse on both sides of the Irish Sea are updated weekly. As usual, the British handicapper is going to give several of the Irish-based horses a slightly higher rating – and therefore weight – than his Irish counterpart.

Evan Williams has not got as many ‘Saturday horses’ as he once had but he remains a trainer that I like to have on side when he targets some of the bigger handicaps. The form of his stable, with the Cheltenham Festival less than a month away, is good and he had a double at Hereford earlier this week with horses priced at 17-2 and 6-1. I am hoping he might have a winner or two at Ascot tomorrow as well because he brings two of his decent handicappers to the Berkshire course from his base in the Vale of Glamorgan, South Wales. PATRIOTIK, who will be ridden by the trainer’s daughter Isabel, bumped into a well-handicapped horse last time in the shape of Red Dirt Road.

Trainer Rebecca Curtis has experienced plenty of challenging seasons since her successes in the early 2010s, when her owners included the legendary Irishman J.P. McManus and her numerous winners included four at the Cheltenham Festival. She eventually added a fifth Festival winner in 2020 when the 50-1 shot Lisnagar Oscar landed the Stayers’ Hurdle. As if to prove the old saying ‘form is temporary, class is permanent’, Curtis has showed signs of reviving the glory days with an impressive 18 per cent winning strike rate from her runners this season. Furthermore, I think that she has a massive chance of landing a sixth Festival winner next month with her horse HAITI COULEURS.

Unless your Wi-Fi has been down this week, you’ll be aware that David Beckham has got his kit off again. He’s back in his underwear for a ‘steamy’ (Daily Mail) ‘full frontal’ (Daily Mail again, though it really isn’t – and I had to watch it, dispassionately I stress, three times for the purposes of this article in order to be sure) campaign for Hugo Boss which, in that hackneyed and usually inaccurate phrase, ‘broke the internet’. Did you have problems putting your Ocado order through? Me neither.

For the second weekend in a row, there is plenty of top-class racing to look forward to on both sides of the Irish Sea. The two-day Dublin Racing Festival will be hosting the highest-class fare but Sandown and Musselburgh both offer fascinating cards too. I will start closer to home where Virgin Bet is sponsoring all six races at Sandown, but only one race has attracted double-figure runners. That’s the Virgin Bet Heroes Handicap Hurdle (3.07 p.m.) in which Henri The Second is likely to go off favourite after his course and distance win in December. In fact, this will be the fifth time in a row that Paul Nicholls’ eight-year-old gelding has lined up at Sandown so he could hardly be more of a course specialist.