Thursday, July 05, 2007

SOUTHWELL - EMERGES FROM THE DEPTHS AS A RACECOURSE AT RISK.

Having already inadvertently pre-empted far-reaching and not especially welcome changes to one racecourse in this blog, I am wary of speculating on future developments at Southwell as I did Haydock nine months ago. However, I have been moved to put fingers to keyboard again having seen the pictures released today of the East Midlands venue, and whilst they clearly show that the flood levels at the track have abated at last (for however long will be the question on everyone’s lips at the course, though), the true extent of the damage wrought by the exceptionally wet summer is only just starting to become apparent.

Not to put too fine a point on it, there is essentially nothing useful or re-usable left of the all-weather track which has been in situ for 18 years, its place taken instead by a mess of salt, silt, stones and slime, and rectification work on this alone is likely to account for £1.5 million of an overall bill which could yet nudge eight figures – emphatically not the kind of money too many racecourses in the country have sitting idle for a rainy day (never mind the several rainy weeks in this instance).

This is a crying shame for one of my favourite tracks in the country, one which at last count I had managed to visit seven times so far this decade, all for the summer jumps meetings with which it does so well. That should have been eight, but my intended visit earlier this year came to nothing in the end. What a greater pity that now looks in hindsight.

In all honesty. Southwell has never been a track of any great significance in the wider scheme of things (nor would its personnel claim otherwise), and its location in a largely nondescript corner of Nottinghamshire interspersed with the odd electricity pylon hardly marks it out as one of the most beautiful places to enjoy racing in the UK – Cartmel or Hexham it is not. It does, however, have a delightfully informal atmosphere, a courteous and dedicated staff, a surprisingly well-proportioned parade ring given the overall compact nature of the site, easy access to all facilities and an open sweets shop to die for.

The Fibresand track has important qualities above and beyond the actuality of its surface. The second course in the country to host an all-weather meeting back in November 1989 (a few days after Lingfield started it all off on October 30th), it remains to this day the only one of the quartet of artificial surface circuits to possess a straight 5f, and it is possessive of both a length of circuit and run-in longer than those of its contemporaries.

Although an infrequent stopping-off point for Festival and Classic winners, Southwell has nevertheless had a few noted course performers and curious moments in its recent history. Reg Hollinshead’s entire Suluk won a staggering 20 contests at the track in three and a half years up to August 1993 – including 18 wins and three seconds from 22 runs in the more widely feared all-weather hurdle races – and would have managed more besides these had injury not forced him to retire to stud (where he cut no ice) at eight. Barely a fortnight would pass during the early 1980s without Bill Clay’s front-running Some Jinks contesting a 2m 74yds chase of some description at the track, winning plenty. It was Southwell that played host to the bizarre contest in January 2002 in which every horse met with mishap before Family Business remounted to win. Lastly, of course, it was at Southwell that losingmost legend Quixall Crossett recorded his 100th consecutive defeat in July 2001.

In light of the course’s recent drubbings it has not taken too long for one inevitable decision to be taken, and no meetings will be run at Southwell until September at the very earliest. Realistically, with time required to lay a new artificial surface and then bed it in, and large sections of the turf jumps track apparently looking a very black shade of green at present, January 2008 would probably not rate as too unkind a projected resumption date. The question is – in what form should Southwell return?

It is probably a measure of the more holistic view of the sport I have taken with age that, even as an arch jumps fan, I refuse to regard the course’s misfortune as a perfect opportunity for it to eschew all-weather racing and return to just what I originally knew it to be, a low-ranking jumps track with an extensive programme of meetings right around the year. Quite the opposite in fact: its status as the only remaining Fibresand venue is not something that should be relinquished lightly, and the hordes of trainers who have in their care animals for whom this slower surface offers their soft ground / sand horses their greatest (in some cases only) chances of winning contents must be desperate for Arena not to use the flood as the excuse to usher in a change to Polytrack.

Inevitably clamours for Polytrack have already been voiced in certain racing forums, the supposed unpredictability and incongruity of Fibresand racing being cited as the main reason why Southwell is a graveyard for punters. Take Tioga Gold's record-breaking win at 125-1 earlier this year out of the equation, and it is absolutely nothing of the sort. A regular correspondent of mine insists that Southwell race analysis is like shooting fish in a barrel, particularly if one is to concentrate on races full of exposed types whose ability or inability to handle Fibresand over (or as well as) Polytrack was well established. I wouldn’t be in a hurry to contradict that assertion. Indeed, whilst other distractions meant that I only tipped on Southwell's Flat meetings spasmodically during my Sportsman tenure, I rarely finished down on the day there, even when confronted with a card of wall-to-wall Banded fare.

This assumes, of course, that Southwell will be reopened whenever opportunity finally presents itself, though in an environment in which shouts of too many races at too many tracks are rife, that cannot rate as a given.

There would be two desperate ironies were the floods to precipitate the closure of the track. Firstly, the whole raison d’etre of the all-weather surface was to provide a program of racing when inclement conditions elsewhere prevented it from taking place. Secondly, the course has provided sterling service in recent seasons as a replacement venue for other tracks, successfully hosting renewals of Doncaster contests such as the Skybet Chase and even as recently as late March picking up a meeting at – would you believe it – a flooded Worcester at short notice.

The hope is that the practicality and logistics of trying to absorb Southwell’s meetings (just under 70 originally scheduled for 2007) within the rest of the group would be enough on its own to dissuade Arena Leisure from calling time on the course. Given that the criticisms leveled at Wolverhampton during its ghastly run of jockeys’ falls and equine fatalities in 2006 included plenty questioning the wisdom of racing on the track somewhere in the region of 100 times in the space of a year, transferring former Southwell AW fixtures to Dunstall Park would run the risk of reopening old debates and possibly – if the worst came to the worst – inviting further accidents.

However, Arena must have a figure in mind beyond which it is not prepared to go to restore the course to a horse- and spectator-fit condition, and coming as they do hard on the heels of a profit warning, events of the last couple of weeks in my favourite little corner of Nottinghamshire leave the track’s owners with some unenviable decisions to make in the very near future.

Tuesday, July 03, 2007

WHO'LL TAKE THE DROP FOR TAKING AWAY THE DROP FENCES?

Tellwright, Tellwright, lama sabachthani?

You may remember that the very first That Racing Blog post of the lot, back in mid-October of last year, meditated on an evident sea-change at Haydock Park, the first sign of which appeared to be the substituting of a number of portable fences for permanent obstacles down the back straight. At the time I wrote that:

The Lancashire venue will never not be a galloper's track, but let's hope its status as a proper jumper's track need not be placed in too much doubt hereafter.

Sadly, events since that posting have confirmed that those three portafences simply represented the tip of the iceberg, and National Hunt racing at Haydock as we have known it for decades came to an end over fences at Easter, and over hurdles with the Swinton meeting a month later.

The 2007-8 season will usher in a revised program consisting of a reduced number of meetings, and – as utterly inadvertently predicted in that October posting – one strip of turf only will be used for both hurdle and chase races on the inside of the course, so that two Flat tracks may be maintained outside of it. To that end, even my hope that the course will “never not be a galloper’s track” looks a slightly forlorn one now.

Clerk of the Course Kirkland Tellwright is not the first bearer of his surname with a bit of “previous” where contentious racecourse decisions are concerned, Bill Tellwright having presided over the closure of Woore, one of the slew of Rules tracks to disappear during the 1960s. Heavily involved with the North Staffordshire Hunt point-to-point fixture, then run at nearby Mucklestone, Bill essentially bought up the assets of Woore when it was given an Easter Saturday fixture that was given to pool so extensively from the same local spectator / horse base as Mucklestone as to decimate patronage.

That was over 40 years ago, however, and simply concerned killing off an infrequently-used Rules racecourse so that a point-to-point venue – which, to be fair, survived until 1982, before all concerned moved the meeting to a new site in Sandon – could flourish. Kirkland Tellwright’s presiding over such a seismic alteration to one of the premier jumps courses in the North, if not the entire country, constitutes iconoclasm on a greater scale altogether.

He has cited welfare issues for both the replacement of all the incumbent stiff fences and also the work now in progress to flatten out the drops on the landing sides of many, yet to this pair of eyes few courses in the country have jumped as well as Haydock over the years. A proper, galloping track with time in between the constituent fences in its two rows (home and back straight) for horses to get into a rhythm, the big, stiff fences compel chasers to learn and maintain good habits of jumping.

It is that compulsion which has so endeared the place to the likes of Gordon Richards, both generations of McCain and owner Trevor Hemmings over the decades. Indeed, the last-named’s buying policy could almost be regarded as one of finding “Haydock Horses” as much as it is “Aintree Horses”, both venues having always been the preserve of his favoured big, strong chasing types. The annoyance expressed by the likes of McCain Snr and Hemmings in the trade press after the full extent of the changes was revealed in late February clearly registered as no surprise, therefore.

Nor, sadly, did the rather less voluble support for the old course from the likes of Paul Nicholls and Philip Hobbs when interviewed at the same time. I've long despaired of certain of the top trainers' complaints over how few opportunities there are for high-class animals (particularly in novices' chases), yet when some such are presented to them at Haydock and Wetherby, courses where - horror of horrors - they'd need an animal which can, you know, jump a bit, they are conspicuously absent.

Haydock's chases have always deserved to be better patronised numerically than they have been for a long time, but not even appearance money or the covering of travelling expenses has been able to bolster turn-out in these as often as not. Suggesting the failure of Hobbs, Nicholls, etc. to support the track better directly lead to the changes at the venue would, of course, be extraordinarily unwise, but their patronage of it has certainly left a bit to be desired. Further, any mitigating argument that Haydock is too far away from their respective Somerset training bases to encourage the trip to it pales when it is considered that:

- Haydock’s location hard up against a prominent junction of the M6 could hardly be more ideal,
- Peter Bowen and Evan Williams will still entertain trips from South Wales to the Sedgefields of this world all year round,
- Team Pipe has been a regular visitor for many years.

Speaking of visitors, the Racing Post article of February 27th outlined the economic case against staging so many National Hunt meetings at the track. Evidently not even 3,000 visitors attended the latest Peter Marsh Chase meeting, and competition from football and rugby league matches was cited.

However, these other distractions have always been there – if not more so then than nowadays, given that the Super League is primarily a spring and summer contest – but Haydock managed to pull bigger crowds for renewals of that and other winter meetings previously, including in some of the filthiest, coldest, wettest winter days imaginable. There were far more than 3,000 present when I first visited the course back on Red Square (or antecedent) Gold Cup day in 1999, and there was no reason to believe the "Clash of the Anti-Titans" between Quixall Crossett and Monaughty Man on the undercard that afternoon had swollen the crowds to anything particularly unusual for the course for the period.

Could there be another reason for the decrease in numbers through the turnstiles, therefore? Has there, perhaps, been a misplaced confidence in recent times that a card containing Graded contests sells itself without further recourse to promotion; that the Haydock half of the North West Masters double-header (with Aintree), Betfair Chase and all, automatically offers a greater attraction for the leisure pound than a routine Premiership match at Liverpool, Everton, Bolton, Wigan or the two Manchester clubs?

Few are the racecourses outside of the big Festival and Classic venues - probably only Towcester (free) and Cartmel (quirky and endearingly picturesque) - that could genuinely afford such a casual attitude to self-promotion; not that Towcester, with its frequent advertising on Attheraces does, you understand.

Whatever the causes of the drastic changes visited upon Haydock, the effects of those changes are likely to take a year or two to become fully apparent. The first change is only too apparent – the new jumps season at the Lancashire track will not commence until November 24th, Betfair Chase day itself and almost certainly the latest such start ever (certainly all of five weeks later than last season). With online fora and certain sections of the press alive with suggestions earlier in the year that a Grade 1 chase simply cannot be run over portable fences, it seems reasonable to assume there will be some very critical eyes cast over events that Saturday afternoon.

Monday, July 02, 2007

RUMOURS OF THIS BLOG'S DEMISE HAVE BEEN GREATLY EXAGGERATED, ETC.

Rather more through accident than design, it has been the best part of five months since That Racing Blog was updated last. A couple of offers I simply had not seen coming, namely to perform point-to-point race reading for the venerable Mackenzie and Harris, and to offer my services as a pundit to the nascent Betfair Radio service, augmented the workload of the freelance articles I write for Racing Ahead magazine beyond all expectations during this period. Only in the last couple of weeks have things calmed down to any particular extent, but with another deadline looming large the respite will be temporary.

Not that this should be taken as a complaint (far from it!), and it is my earnest hope that all these engagements endure for months and years to come.

The blog has remained in my mind throughout, not least on account of the small but steady trickle of correspondences pursuant to blog entries that I have received. A couple of these have been posted as comments against entries rather than emailed to me directly, so it is only right and proper I acknowledge them during the course of this post, however late in the day.

A thank you, therefore, to comrade Aranalde, who was particularly taken with my November 7th-dated piece on the process of pre- and post-race analysis as performed during my time at the Sportsman. You are right, Aranalde, yours wasn’t the first time I had read or heard someone say it was a shame about the paper’s demise, but I genuinely do not tire about discussing it in print – relatively few of those associated with it have to this day, after all.

The mystery horse whose owners’ letter of complaint inspired that posting in the first place did finally win again the other week, by the way, and – as promised – hearty congratulations to all concerned for keeping the faith of it so doing, though it took it eight goes and another race with a softly-acquired lead for it to do so. The Racing Post, to its credit, did not go overboard in its praise of what is essentially now a pretty exposed animal.

Thank you also to Andybfc for your kind words regarding my tipping of Voy Por Ustedes as the Champion Chase winner as early as last October (in my Sportsman Ten To Follow piece, more on which shortly). If the truth be told, that particular piece of tipping went far, far better than I had ever dared hope for – not just in the sense that he won, but also that he was returned at a very good value price on the day.

Few people, I suspect, could have envisaged him being sent off at 5-1 following his routine dismissal of all rivals in the inaugural Desert Orchid Chase over Christmas and the news that Kauto Star would be heading for the Gold Cup rather than Champion Chase, but the timely reappearance and victory of the long-absent Well Chief in the Game Spirit six weeks later was impressive enough to garner him all the market support thereafter at the expense of Alan King’s six year-old.

There was enough that I disliked about the Newbury contest for me to keep faith with Voy for reasons other than professional integrity. Whilst the race was a truly-run affair given the soft going, a couple of Well Chief’s major rivals – from both of whom he was receiving weight, incidentally - failed to get involved (Voy himself and also Foreman, who ran lifelessly and pulled up distressed), and he therefore only had Ashley Brook, who had run with the choke out up front from flagfall, to pick off as he pleased.

Clear from the third last, Well Chief’s win didn’t constitute the sort of hard reintroduction that was going to tell us much about how much ability – or indeed appetite – he retained for or in a fight at the highest level, and this even before the risk of the “bounce” factor striking was considered. Moreover, I suspect some may have made too much of Voy’s unseating at halfway, which was a silly, soft departure and certainly nothing that should have been taken to indicate a deeper underlying problem with his jumping. He had, after all, made short work of the Old Course in winning the Arkle the previous season.

We all know what happened subsequently, of course, and whilst any accusations leveled that the Champion Chase was similarly too blighted by the failures to finish of several likely contenders – Oneway, Ashley Brook and Well Chief himself – to count as a wholly satisfactory race are hard to dispute, I would still have to regard it as the result that gave me the most satisfaction of the entire 2006-7 season.

Voy was one of only a couple of horses from my Ten To Follow list that managed to return a profit to a £1 level stake in all its races from the article’s publication date, October 3rd, through to the end of the season; and this rates as a bit of a disappointment for me because, as I mentioned in my December 8th posting, the raison d’etre of this feature was not to find readers ten Festival winners at all costs, but rather the biggest level stakes profit possible. Notwithstanding that, the final analysis reveals that I did return a little bit of a profit…

Grecian Groom …………………. + 27.13 points from 8 races
Voy Por Ustedes ………………… + 3.67 points from 4 races
Mr Nosie ……………………....……. - 0.00 points from 0 races
Corran Ard ………………………. – 0.17 points from 2 races
The King of Angels ………...... – 1.00 points from 4 races
Moncada Way …………………. – 1.00 points from 1 race
Ossmoses ……………………....…. –3.00 points from 3 races
Sovietica ………………………….. – 3.75 points from 6 races
Bothar Na ………………………... – 5.00 points from 5 races
Knowhere ………………………… - 6.67 points from 8 races

FINAL SCORE …………………… + 10.21 points from 41 races.

I would be the first to admit, however, that the picture would have looked far less rosy had Grecian Groom not popped up at 33-1 at Lingfield halfway through the winter. Even this I would count as a bit of a pyrrhic victory, to be honest, as it salvaged the season of a horse that had crashingly failed to convert his taking debut bumper-winning form to hurdles as much as it salvaged mine.

He, along with The King of Angels, did not progress over the season as I had intended, whereas the combination of over-keenness and soggy ground checked Sovietica’s development all winter. Ossmoses, Mr Nosie and Corran Ard were all compromised by injury to varying degrees; Bothar Na and Knowhere were set some hard tasks and were found wanting; and Noel Chance kept Moncada Way’s powder dry after an unprepossessing debut.

Of all of the ten listed, I would give some consideration to choosing Mr Nosie (unexposed over fences, albeit with fitness to prove, but then so did Knowhere last season) and Corran Ard (one big handicap hurdle win at rewarding odds should be attainable if returning the same horse) in repeat circumstances next season. Sovietica would rate as fairly tempting as well given her usually chase-oriented connections (Stewart and Monique Pike), but I am not convinced she is quite the same old-fashioned stamp of an animal as most of the animals they are associated with. A judgment on Moncada Way, meanwhile, would have to be reserved until it becomes apparent whom is likely to get the stable jockey’s position at Noel Chance’s yard following Tom Doyle’s return to Ireland.

Not that this need rate of particular importance right this moment, of course. I have a good few months before anyone needs to put the gun to my head for a list of suggestions. Jumps tipping contests are seldom won in July.

Ah, it’s good to get the first post in a long while under my belt. I suppose I had better think of doing the same for my Brancepethfan blog, untouched by human hand for nine months now….