Spectator Life

After a week of rain, the official ground conditions for tomorrow’s cards at Newmarket and Haydock both have ‘heavy’ in the description, with a little more of the wet stuff forecast too. If I have learnt only one thing from my decades as a punter, it is to bet with caution when the ground turns into a quagmire. Yes, of course, it is best to back horses that have won or run well on ground described as ‘heavy’ but it is not as simple as that, or even those with a basic knowledge of the form book would soon be rich. When the ground is really, really soft and the mud is flying, it is often accompanied by a series of unpredictable results.

It’s been all of 49 years since a horse trained in Scotland won the Virgin Bet Ayr Gold Cup, one of the classiest sprint handicaps of the season. However, I am hoping that trend ends tomorrow and that a horse in the care of genial Jim Goldie lands the winning pot of more than £92,000. Goldie, who trains in Uplawmoor, East Renfrewshire, and who loves to plunder big races in his native Scotland, has two excellent chances of winning the race (Ayr, 3.35 p.m.) that has attracted its usual maximum field of 25 runners. Jordan Electrics is a typical Goldie runner in that he is a veteran, at eight years old, and yet somehow the canny handler has got staggering improvement from the horse. Jordan Electrics started the season in April off a modest official rating of 72.

Only seven runners are due to line up for the final Classic of the flat season, the Group 1 Betfred St Leger. Unsurprisingly, the small field at Doncaster tomorrow (3.40 p.m.) is dominated by runners trained in Ireland by Co Tipperary maestro Aidan O’Brien. I had not expected to bet in the race but the sponsors are paying three places and so I can’t resist an each way dabble Of O’Brien’s three runners, Illinois is top rated and has a favourite’s chance because we know, from his Royal Ascot win in the Group 2 Queen’s Vase in June, that he will stay tomorrow’s trip of more than one mile and six furlongs.

My favourite flat handicap of the season is the Club Godolphin Cesarewitch at Newmarket on 12 October. I have a good betting record in the race but this year the ante-post market is complicated by the fact that the brilliant Irish trainer Willie Mullins has entered no less than ten horses in the race. As always, the Irish runners, particularly those from the Mullins yard, are likely to have a big say in the outcome of this marathon contest which is run over two miles and two furlongs, and which therefore attracts lots of dual-purpose horses with decent hurdling form. The main problem is that Mullins keeps his cards close to his chest on his race plans and some of his best staying handicappers will go for the more valuable Friends of the Curragh Irish Cesarewitch two weekends earlier.

Tamfana is just the sort of short-priced favourite that I love to take on. Yes, of course she might win tomorrow’s Sky Bet Atalanta Stakes (Sandown, 2.25 p.m.). After all, she was fourth in the Qipco 1000 Guineas at Newmarket in May and, with more luck in running, she would probably have won that day. However, her two runs since then have been more moderate and her French handler David Menuisier, who trains in West Sussex, seems unsure what is his three-year-old filly’s best distance. Last time she failed to stay a mile and a half on soft ground at Longchamp and so tomorrow she reverts to the Guineas trip of a mile. All in all, her current odds of around even money are terribly skinny for a horse that has yet to win this season from four starts.

The former England football manager Sven-Goran Eriksson died today. He had terminal cancer and said he expected to be dead before the year was out. In an age when such grim diagnoses are usually kept private until their morbid predictions have come to pass, it was characteristically candid of the 76-year-old Swede, even though doing so invited a fresh round of media scrutiny of a life that has already been scrutinised intensively over many years. He treated players as grown-ups, even though they often weren’t. Any England football manager gets attention – it comes with the territory.

Like most fathers, I occasionally offer words of advice to my children even if they choose not to take them. Over the years, I have often told my two (now grown-up) daughters: ‘judge a person on how he or she accepts bad news’. My thinking is that pretty much anyone can be charming and generous-spirited when they receive good news, but it takes a really strong, admirable character to be equally magnanimous and upbeat when they have to deal with really unwelcome news. Trainer Ed Bethell recently passed this quirky little test of mine in glowing style. He had to inform the press that Mickley, his first and only Royal Ascot winner – incidentally tipped in this column when he won in June – would continue his career in Hong Kong.

The new Premiership season kicked off this weekend and, with all the usual hype, will come novelties. There are the gamely optimistic new arrivals and returnees, no doubt a breakout star or two, some eyebrow-raising new hairstyles (Mo Salah) and some ingeniously tweaked – and therefore ‘must-have’ – revenue-gouging strips. As ever, there will be new rules, including yet further tinkering with VAR. But what interests me, as an English teacher and student of socio-linguistics, will be any novelties in the figurative language which the players, fans and journalists use to describe the game. Over nearly 50 years of watching football, it has been fascinating to hear the football lexicon evolve in ways that can be quite culturally revealing.

The William Hill Great St Wilfrid Handicap at Ripon tomorrow (3.20 p.m.) is always a difficult puzzle for punters to unravel. Run over six furlongs for a first prize of more than £50,000, a field of 19 runners has been declared. With its unusual undulations on the sprint course, Ripon is a specialist track which means that it is an advantage to have strong course and distance form. The trouble is that so many of these experienced sprinters have just that so it does not narrow the field down by that much.  Northern trainers have a superb record in the race too but, once again, they are extremely well represented in the race tomorrow and so this fact is not a huge help either in the search to find the winner.

It’s become a regular occurrence: a friend or a friend-of-a-friend is visiting London, wants to go to a football game and messages asking for help getting tickets. My standard response is: no chance. The most recent of these was from New Zealand-based Spectator contributor David Cohen, whose son will be in London in the autumn. I’d love to be able to help him but know I almost certainly can’t. The sad reality is that I’m struggling to get tickets myself these days, let alone able to assist others. The clubs themselves are too greedy to do anything other than continue to wring as much out of the fans as they can When I first started going to football, to West Ham games in the late eighties, it used to be easy getting in. You just turned up.

As a confirmed critic of modern tattoos, who sounded off in these very pages about the ugly plague of body tats infesting our streets, I might be expected to disapprove of the latest manifestation of the fashion – the habit of many athletes taking part in the Paris Olympics to adorn themselves with the distinctive five interlocking rings of the Games’ logo: what I’m calling the ‘champ stamp’. In fact, the athletes have such beautiful bodies – young, toned and fit – and the rings themselves have such a pleasing symmetry that I can only approve and applaud the discreet addition of the logo to their rippling musculatures.

Glorious Goodwood has hopefully saved the best until last with two fabulous days of racing still to come. The detractors will point out that too many races on this undulating, turning track have hard-luck stories and the draw is often all-important as well. However, when the sun shines, this meeting is hard to beat in terms of highlighting flat racing at its best. I am already heavily invested in the Coral Golden Mile (today 3 p.m.) in which it’s a huge advantage to be drawn in single figures. Johan bucked the trend on soft ground last year when he won from stall 18 but the previous seven winners were from berths 1, 3, 3, 3, 2, 5 and 2. Those who love statistics will be in no rush to back a horse with a double-figure draw.

Mondays and Thursdays are my days. Eight a.m. Before breakfast. The pool opens at seven for those zealous souls who like to swim before going to work. They’re gone by eight when the pool is divided into five lanes with arrows telling you which way up and which down. I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes. Let those mad fools in the fast lane work up a storm with their splashy-flashy butterfly, the sexy crawl, the somersault flip back to the beginning and off again. I’m in the slow lane. It could be a metaphor for my life. I like lanes. You know where you are with lanes I grew up by the sea and learnt to swim when I was six.

I was standing in a filthy sports hall at the back of the local leisure centre. A bony man with a shaved head handed me a green belt. ‘Well done, Master Zak,’ he said. Ten-year-old me bowed and walked towards the wall of parents. They had been stood there for three hours, watching other people’s children take turns punching the air, shouting a few mispronounced words of Korean. Someone played ‘Eye of the Tiger’ through a tinny speaker. One of the bug-eyed ‘instructors-in-training’ gave me a toothy grin and a thumbs up. I’m almost certain he worked there for free. Sitting in the back of the car on the way home, dobok still on, I realised that after four years of combat sports and a variety of colourful belts, I had learnt nothing about defending myself.

Take a bow, SUMMERGHAND. Trainer David O’Meara’s gallant old warrior will be participating in his 100th race tomorrow when he contests the Moet & Chandon International Stakes over seven furlongs (Ascot, 3 p.m.). The achievements of this gelding are remarkable since he made his racecourse debut at Doncaster in May 2017. He has won 17 of his 99 starts and amassed more than £624,000 in prize money. Those victories, all of them over six furlongs, include the Unibet Stewards’ Cup at Glorious Goodwood in 2020 and the Virgin Bet Ayr Gold Cup in 2022. At the height of his powers, Summerghand was running off an official mark of 113 whereas tomorrow, aged ten, he will be running off just 91.