NATIONAL FANS AND FOES ALIKE - DO BETTER

As usual, there are so many words burning in my heart after another emotionally charged Grand National, and as usual, it'll probably be next week (too late) before I've got time to formulate them into a more extensive blog piece than this one will prove to be.

I'll say this much, though. That today's race was the fourth in a row without a fatality strikes me as grounds for quiet reflection (relief, even) that the post-2012 attempts to make - to borrow a phrase from the racing author and historian John Saville - "a 19th century race suitable for 21st century horses" do not as yet appear to have unravelled when faced with their sternest annual test.

What today should not be, however, is grounds for proponents of the race to indulge in the triumphalist, yah-boo taunts they'd primarily associate with their opponents - and there have been plenty of these committed to cyberspace already. That's disappointing.

The sport I've loved now for nearly 35 years is too nuanced, too complicated, to deserve to be reduced to an over-simple binary of aggressively polarised pro and anti arguments, delivered in a perpetual dialogue of graceless insults.

Shouldn't everyone be trying to prove themselves capable of a bit better than that?

Be that all as it may. I'll carry plenty forward from what I saw today. 

Mouse Morris's emotional response to the sweetest end to a dire twelve months since the tragic death of his son overseas.  

Young master Mullins' big-eyed wonder at winning the world's biggest race at an age when I'd still not learned to lace up a pair of DMs properly. 

The recovery from a mistake by Robert Dunne to end all recoveries. 

Paul Moloney getting that dyspraxic cyborg Buywise to jump round out the back with barely a moment's worry.  

Rule The World cocky as you like in the winners enclosure afterwards, surely auditioning for mysmughorse.com.  

All of these things.