What do you do when the racecourses of the world that we inhabit at this time of year (say: National Hunt) are frozen over, and not even the new fandangled frost covers (up there with all-weather racing under the Trade Descriptions Act) can ensure that they remain, well, free of frost?

1. Go to the park or to the cinema or to Funderland (it’s still on isn’t it?) with the kids, get some brownie points in the bank, thus reducing your brownie point overdraft, because you will need your overdraft to be as low as you can get it when you are looking for the annual extension going into February and March.

2. Take a week off, go to New York, go skiing or something.

3. Plan your 2010, objectives and such, review the do’s and don’t’s of betting strategy that you fastidiously compiled this time last year and haven’t looked at since 17th February.

4. Trawl through the videos of Leopardstown and Kempton over Christmas again, looking for things and horses that you didn’t spot first time round.

5. Get into the all-weather.  It surely can’t be that difficult to make it pay (lay front-runners at Lingfield, follow the money at Southwell, back Hugh Taylor’s 2-point bets at anything that you can get that is bigger than half the recommended odds). Plenty do make it pay don’t they?

Three thoughts from Christmas. Firstly, Kauto Star was great, he really was, and it was brilliant for racing, but did his performance really merit a 9lb rise in his official mark? This was his 33rd race. Are we really to believe that he can have improved by that much, a near 10-year-old, that his performance on St Stephen’s Day was 9lb better than anything he had done before? On the clock, according to Topspeed, it wasn’t even as good as the performance that he put up when he won the 2007 King George.

Second thought: would Captain Cee Bee have beaten Sizing Europe had he not come down at the last in the Bord Na Mona Chase? Probably I think. Most people think so too. Then why is Eddie Harty’s horse, a previous Cheltenham Festival winner, a bigger price than Henry de Bromhead’s horse for the Arkle?

Finally, how good was Go Native? Very, I’d say. He has now proven that he can quicken off a fast pace against high class rivals, he doesn’t need a crawl like he had at Newcastle. He went fully two lengths clear, put the race to bed, before idling and nearly getting caught by Starluck. He had much more in hand than the minimal winning margin. He is also a previous Cheltenham Festival winner.  Why then is he not favourite for the Champion Hurdle?

For more of Donn’s thoughts visit www.donnmcclean.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 5th, 2010 at 1:58 pm and is filed under Betting, Horse Racing, Irish Racing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.