We’ll win the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle anyway, that’s for sure. Sure isn’t Dunguib the best novice to put his head through a bridle since Golden Cygnet? Don’t mind about his jumping, it’s only the English saying he can’t jump, trying to convince themselves, and he won’t have to jump over the hurdles anyway, he can kick every one of them out of the ground if he wants and Brian O’Connell will still be able to stop for a pint at the Guinness Village on the way up the home straight before standing up in his irons at the furlong pole.

(Big cheer.)

We’ll win the Arkle as well I’d say. (more…)

There was a time, a couple of years ago, that you couldn’t walk down any main street in Ireland on any day within four and a half weeks of the third Tuesday in March but you would happen upon a pre-Cheltenham evening.  That’s not the case any more, but nor have they gone the way of the cigarette-smoking dinosaurs.  The good ones and the good causes have survived.

They fill a need, that’s for sure.  The appetite for Cheltenham around these parts is pretty much insatiable these days, it’s a perennial thing, Cheltenham talk and Cheltenham thoughts the meat and drink, pre-Cheltenham evenings the pieces of bread that keep you going until the main course arrives.(more…)

There is a big difference between taking a five-year-old racing and taking a three-year-old racing, even if the three-year-old was the five-year-old two years ago, if you follow.  (Humans we’re talking about here now, little people, not horses.)  Incidentally, neither activity is in the same ballbark as taking a three-year-old and a one-year-old racing at the same time, or taking a four-year-old, a two-year-old and a zero-year-old racing, even if you do have help on hand.  You don’t want to be taking full responsibility for the three of them, that’s for sure, not if experience is any kind of a guide (one racecourse is not big enough), unless, of course, you are into penance (it is Lent after all).  Even if you are, better to wear sack-cloth and flail yourself periodically with a cat o’nine tails than to try to master the three of them and a seven-race-card all at once.(more…)