WHERE TO GO RACING... IF YOU DON'T LIKE RACING.

Back in 1937 John Betjeman immortalised the line “Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!” in print. Nearly seven decades on, the temptation to suggest he should have directed his apocryphal payload nine and a half miles further down the road to Ascot racecourse instead is all too great for your correspondent.

Of the hundred or more trips I have made to a racecourse since resuming my racegoing activities in 1998, I have little hesitation in nominating my trip to the Berkshire venue for the first day of the festive meeting last Friday as the least satisfying of the lot… and bear in mind that this itinerary has included everything right down the food chain to thinly-contested late Spring Midlands point-to-points in driving rain.

Windsor had proven a most capable substitute for Ascot when I partook of this two-day meeting two years ago, comfortably playing host to the swollen crowds eager to see the likes of Baracouda and Crystal D’Ainay slug it out around the figure of eight’s tight track and soft - but perfectly acceptable, and accepted – racing surface. As Friday afternoon wore on, I couldn’t help but increasingly dwell on how sadly missed as a National Hunt venue the Thameside track undoubtedly is.

I never went to Ascot before its highly publicised and widely criticised rebuild, so to a certain extent I have to take the word of the semi-regulars I bumped into who decried that, not for the first time in recent months, getting on for half of the advertised food, drink and entertainment outlets were not in use.

Likewise an ex-Sportsman colleague, back with his previous employers Timeform following the demise of the short-lived daily paper, assured me that the venue was always among the very worst for getting a good view of horses long enough to take the physical conformation notes required of him (even when not especially full as on this occasion), and that since the rebuild it has got worse still.

My problems with Ascot, however, include some that I suspect have been extant since before the rebuild.

The National Hunt course’s situation inside the Flat equivalent, itself of course necessarily wide to cope with the sizeable fields come the Royal Meeting, renders watching racing there a notably detached, impersonal, alienating spectacle. I didn’t have the foresightedness to gauge the distance from the foot of the stands to the far side of the Flat track, but learning it to be 100 metres or further away would not have surprised.

The knock-on effect for viewing (or not viewing) the rest of the jumps circuit, not much short of 1m6f in length, is easy enough to guess, therefore, and dependency on the giant video screen beside the winning post – itself requiring binoculars to view to any great extent – becomes all the more so, or on a gloomy day such as this maybe even absolute.

Little of this would matter so much were the excessive distance away from the action the spectator has to contend with compensated for by a place in the stands of suitable trajectory, a compensation fellow Berkshire track Newbury offers in spades. Not Ascot, though: never have I encountered a racecourse that guards its best views of the track with such zeal.

“General Admission” (for which read Tattersalls) customers are afforded a stand in name only, barely higher off the ground at its highest than other noted low-slung equivalents at smaller tracks in the country, e.g. Stratford. Swinley Bottom, of course, has its name for a reason, and as the ground falls away down the back straight, so it becomes absolutely impossible to draw even the most tentative ideas from the General stand as to what is occurring as the runners reach that part of the course.

Several attempts at getting even the most fleeting of glimpses from a higher floor of the main stands complex were all thwarted by either the strategic positioning of boxes (Royal and corporate) and the manifold posses of civil but utterly unbending security people.

All in all this was far from the best or most rewarding use I’ve ever put £21 worth of entry fee to (inclusive of a staggering £7 car parking charge), and that’s before the stellar prices for even a simple sausage baguette and chips from what looked to be the cheapest of those eateries – of those that were open - is taken into account. At least the hot toddy seller was contrite enough to label his larger glasses of mulled wine (£7.50 a pop) as “obscene” rather than just “large”… at least, I hope it was contrition.

GRAYSONSCOLUMN VERSUS THE WORLD - SCORING DRAW AT HALF-TIME

There will be any number of grander, more significant races run during the course of this jumps season, of course, but the maiden hurdle on Taunton’s otherwise innocuous card on November 27th had more of my integrity and judgment as an analyst / tipster riding on it than most.

Some of those 25,000 or so worthy souls who had ratcheted the Sportsman up to its highest ever paid-for sales figures in the few weeks immediately before its demise (the irony, the irony!) may have happened to notice that each member of the racing team was in the throes of nominating his or her “ten to follow” during its last week of trading. My ten sneaked into issue number 191 of 193, on October 3rd.

The remit for our choices was emphatically NOT just to try to find ten horses likely to be vying for Championship honours come March, as it was reckoned that:

- the season is far bigger than the four days of the Festival, and
- pinpointing animals likely to show a healthy return on a £1 level stake was more in keeping with the raison d’etre of a betting paper.

I’d no quarrel with either assertion. Therefore, with the exception of Voy Por Ustedes (whom I’m hoping won’t have to watch the backside of the terrific Kauto Star disappear from view too many more times this season) and the now-sidelined Mr Nosie, my list remained relatively short of real or aspiring superstars. Just the way I like it.

One of my ten was Corran Ard, the happiest accident of a great summer for Evan Williams. Originally intended to be given one spin on the Flat to restore confidence after two years out, he instead won three handicaps, including a £20,000 0-100 at Pontefract.

My thinking was that he’d be good enough to land a small novices’ hurdle at least, but become a more rewarding proposition when pitched into a big handicap contest, and in particular the Imperial Cup at Sandown – two game Flat wins at up to 10f indicated an ability to handle the track, and his form in Ireland included a win over the same easy ground conditions as the Esher track is still well capable of producing in early March.

In the same article, as in common with all my colleagues, I was given the opportunity to nominate one horse to avoid for the season, and whilst there other animals out there that were opposable on the grounds of being poorly handicapped or getting on a bit, I didn’t have to think too long and hard before opting to bury Paul Nicholls' ex-Flat recruit Ouninpohja, writing:

Good luck to all concerned, but it’s far from guaranteed that a switch to hurdles will see the Ouninpohja who stormed to a five-timer and a triple-figure Flat rating in 2005 re-emerge to replace the frustrating, head-tossing, unwilling Ouninpohja of 2006 – and certainly not worth the 165,000gns his new connections paid to find out.

That Ouninpohja turned out in a small West Country contest for his hurdles debut, as so many from his yard do, registered as no great surprise, but the pounds signs lit up in my eyes when I saw that Corran Ard was in opposition for his first try over timber also. Vaunted Nicholls animals in 2m1f Taunton novices’ hurdles do not go off at working man’s prices, and a win for Corran Ard at the SP of 5-1 over an Ouninpohja by then trading as the 4-6F jolly would have counted as a very nice boost to my level stakes running total (not doing desperately well so far, to be truthful) as well as a vindication of my judgment.

We know the rest, though. Despite still being only two months on from his final catastrophic display of pratting about under pressure to snatch defeat from victory on the Flat, Ouninpohja looked a calm, confident and altogether different animal throughout here. He was ultimately unextended to win by a length having picked off Corran Ard at the last, instantly catapulting himself into the leading half dozen or so for the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle betting off the back of a performance the Racing Post rated just 6lb inferior to Noland’s in taking that Cheltenham feature earlier this year.

Not quite the outcome for which I was hoping, then, and maybe the change of scenery and discipline were going to help Ouninpohja realise all the potential that, really and truly, something formerly rated as high as 110 on the Flat should be capable of displaying if switching to hurdles, making my decision to oppose him look very foolish indeed on the way.

Back over the same course and distance yesterday, however, there were the first signs that maybe, just maybe, Ouninpohja won’t prove quite as willing or capable of finding the necessary late on all of the time over hurdles either, for whilst he looked all over the winner turning for home, the response off the bridle one flight from the finish simply didn’t pass muster.

Time may show that the 11l winner De Soto, on only his second start for an age, is now suitably over his problems to replicate, if not better, the form of his second in the Festival Bumper 20 months ago, but Ouninpohja still had an undeniable advantage fitness-wise after a sensible enough 2006 campaign spread over both codes (nine runs in eight months couldn’t count as excessive). Moreover, whilst the ground at Taunton was softer than a fortnight earlier, the gelding has won quite peaceably with give underfoot, and indeed if we are to take one of his former trainers Alan Swinbank’s word as gospel, he wasn’t especially enjoying it on faster even when running up his five-timer for that handler in 2005.

Barring a clash with something with a huge reputation at home, you suspect it would take another reversal or two in this company for his starting odds to lengthen to any particular extent, and whilst one relative failure over hurdles may not be enough in and of itself to write him off entirely, the evidence of that run - plus my commitment in print to opposing him! – will have me looking to take him on next time out.

Corran Ard, in the meantime, was able to justify far skinnier odds than last time’s 5-1 – 5-6F this time around, in fact – in taking a Southwell maiden hurdle on good to soft this afternoon. He showed a willing attitude to outbattle Pevensey, like him a horse rated in the high 80s at his best on the Flat, by a neck, with all else well held in behind. Clearly it’s a long way from £2,600 pots at the Nottinghamshire venue to Listed handicap hurdles, and the projected target of the Imperial Cup may prove wide of the mark in several senses, but if nothing else the last 48 hours have served to reaffirm which of these two horses I’d prefer to have on my side to “win ugly” if my life depended on it.

Changing horse and venue briefly to return to my last post from a few weeks ago, the intervening period of time has seen the return to action of the horse whose connections complained to the Sportsman when my review of his win in a rotten Northern handicap chase in September was not fawning enough.

I insisted at the time his jumping out in the lead was simply as functional as it should have been given he had no competition for his preferred front-running berth. On this subsequent appearance, he once again had a soft early lead and found jumping comfortable enough for as long as that remained the case.

That he was then unable to maintain that lead to the end (on a course more suited to pillar to post victories than that of his previous victory) against:

- a horse already beaten 130l in a subsequent outing against similar opposition, and
- another – tubed – rival rated 22lb inferior and running 10lb wrong in total on the day including his jockey’s overweight,

didn’t look to me like anything other than vindication of my previous assertion that recording another victory was likely to prove beyond him.

It’s nice to be proven right sometimes. My dearest wish is to make more of a habit of it as the season progresses.