Racing Post: Amateurs

rorydelargy said:
For the sake of objectivity, I've checked the Spotlight comment on Litenup yesterday, and referenced the record of Alistair Lidderdale; Frank Carter states that the yard has had "no winners from few 2yo runners" which seems fair to me, especially given that the horse was a massive outsider. The interesting aspect is the difference between HS's recollection of the trainer's career and what the record books state.

Alistair Lidderdale has held a licence for seven years next January and has sent out 27 2yo runners in that time, none of whom have won. I'm not knocking him (I've met him and he's a lovely bloke who trains cheap horses perfectly well) or Headstrong; it's just a little ironic that a thread slagging off the Post for its inaccuracies should be slightly short of the mark in terms of its figures.
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Yes, Isn't it Ironic? (with apologies to Alanis Morrissette)
 
I do believe the RP only pay £100 per day (ie per card). So yes, peanuts - if you're that good, you'd make far more punting, per race even, probably!
 
Shadow Leader said:
I do believe the RP only pay £100 per day (ie per card). So yes, peanuts - if you're that good, you'd make far more punting, per race even, probably!
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They pay by the race and tend to assign two or three races per meeting to each writer, or sometimes one race at two or three meetings; no-one does an entire card these days. I believe it's £50 per race but I may be wrong.
 
Ill do it for €20 a day.

Spotlight

If the first 5 favs have all been beat than THE FAV is the one to be with as 3/8 favs win. Otherwise a race to swerve.
 
Seems a flawed system if they pay the same for a 4-runner 2-y-o minor event at Wolverhampton than they do for a 19-runner handicap at Glorious Goodwood. Though as you say Rory, if meetings are split between 3 or so writers, then it wouldn't be that difficult to ensure there's a fair spread of the work.
 
Wasn't correcting you either Rory, it's just the amount I've heard several times. You could well be right in that it is for two races, I'd suspect more like 3 or 4 mind!
 
rorydelargy said:
For the sake of objectivity, I've checked the Spotlight comment on Litenup yesterday, and referenced the record of Alistair Lidderdale; Frank Carter states that the yard has had "no winners from few 2yo runners" which seems fair to me, especially given that the horse was a massive outsider. The interesting aspect is the difference between HS's recollection of the trainer's career and what the record books state.

Alistair Lidderdale has held a licence for seven years next January and has sent out 27 2yo runners in that time, none of whom have won. I'm not knocking him (I've met him and he's a lovely bloke who trains cheap horses perfectly well) or Headstrong; it's just a little ironic that a thread slagging off the Post for its inaccuracies should be slightly short of the mark in terms of its figures.
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Rory I very deliberately said SINCE HE'S BEEN TRAINING ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT.

I have no idea what number of 2yr olds he had for George Ward, or when helping Hughie Morrison set up his yard [they would have been under Hughie's name anyway] in the first three years after he took out his licence - very few I imagine for GW as he was already moving to NH horses at that period, which is why he employed Alastair at the time.

I had a conversation on the subject of how many 2yr old runners they had had with the trainer's wife in the yard office, only an hour before I wrote the post, and she checked the record* herself in the books!

I became involved with the yard about a year after Alastair moved here to Eastbury, so I do have some clue as to how long he's been here and what he's been up to! It was me who introduced you, if you remember...

So SL, you can put your predictable cheap jibe back where it belongs!


For the Record*, the 4 horses were/are:

Night Rainbow - never any good!
Marron Flore - never any good either!

It's Dubai Dolly - doing very well, 2nd in a hot race on her 2nd run
Litenup - satisfactory first run this week, still a bit weak

Only the latter two, currently in training, were actually bought by Al, the two others were given him by their hopeful owners... Al's had a very few other 2yr olds in his yard, maybe 2/3, but hasn't run them as not being early types, they weren't ready - and if they aren't, he won't!

The spotlight text did say 'the yard hasn't had a 2yr old winner in 5 years' - since he's been here /had the yard only 4, it was imo lazy journalism! I do understand it must be quite hard in the circs to put in the necessary research for total accuracy, but when you read misleading or wrong stuff about trainers you know, it does leave you a bit mistrustful of the Spotlights in general
 
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Headstrong said:
Rory I very deliberately said SINCE HE'S BEEN TRAINING ON HIS OWN ACCOUNT.

I have no idea what number of 2yr olds he had for George Ward, or when helping Hughie Morrison set up his yard [they would have been under Hughie's name anyway] in the first three years after he took out his licence - very few I imagine for GW as he was already moving to NH horses at that period, which is why he employed Alastair at the time.

I had a conversation on the subject of how many 2yr old runners they had had with the trainer's wife in the yard office, only an hour before I wrote the post, and she checked the record* herself in the books!

I became involved with the yard about a year after Alastair moved here to Eastbury, so I do have some clue as to how long he's been here and what he's been up to! It was me who introduced you, if you remember...

So SL, you can put your predictable cheap jibe back where it belongs!


For the Record*, the 4 horses were/are:

Night Rainbow - never any good!
Marron Flore - never any good either!

It's Dubai Dolly - doing very well, 2nd in a hot race on her 2nd run
Litenup - satisfactory first run this week, still a bit weak

Only the latter two, currently in training, were actually bought by Al, the two others were given him by their hopeful owners... Al's had a very few other 2yr olds in his yard, maybe 2/3, but hasn't run them as not being early types, they weren't ready - and if they aren't, he won't!

The spotlight text did say 'the yard hasn't had a 2yr old winner in 5 years' - since he's been here /had the yard only 4, it was imo lazy journalism! I do understand it must be quite hard in the circs to put in the necessary research for total accuracy, but when you read misleading or wrong stuff about trainers you know, it does leave you a bit mistrustful of the Spotlights in general
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Headstrong,

the stats I have included are for Alastair's career as a licenced trainer ~ whether he was training for George Ward or Joe Bloggs is irrelevant and your reiteration of the phrase "in his own right" is entirely arbitrary. To clarify, the stats do not include any runners when he was assisting Hughie Morrison. You are completely off beam with your criticism of Spotlight (I don't have the comment re Kijivu when she won but suspect it may have mentioned that the stable hadn't had a winner over hurdles in a year which would have been accurate). Your "correction" of the figures mentioned by me (and Spotlight) is both unnecessary and slightly embarrassing; to reiterate, the content was neither wrong nor misleading. I hope these are your views and not those of the trainer btw ~ it's sweet that you should try to defend his record, but if he's annoyed by what was written then it makes him look a bit petty.

I mentioned that this is not about criticising you or Alastair (and whether I met him through you doesn't really matter), but you made specific criticism of Frank Carter which was unjustified. Remember, Spotlight is simply a summary of why each runner should or shouldn't be of interest to punters. The fact that Alastair used to be a private trainer to George Ward before taking out a public licence is of no concern to punters as he still held a licence "in his own right" as you say. Unless you are suggesting that Alistair wasn't training the horses at the time, then his results in that period are perfectly valid. The fact that his two year olds had run fairly well recently might have been considered valid, except when you consider that Litenup was apparently running out of her class, making such comments redundant.

You call this "lazy journalism" but it's not even journalism at all ~ it's a betting guide, not a short biography of the trainer. As I've pointed out earlier, Spotlight writers vary in their ability to do the job, but they are all individuals and deserve individual (and accurate) criticism. Perhaps I'm a little sensitive as two of my friends are or have been Spotlight writers and they get plenty of people slagging them off on betting forums (which they are likely to be members of) with varying degrees of justification.
 
It seems to me that as Spotlight writers are paid "peanuts" and also that it is on record that the Spotlight choice is invariably overbet (can't recall the exact figure the research put forward), the conditions are present whereby paying said Spotlight writer to put forward a specific choice which would be advantageous to someone or other would be viable.

Of course, I am categorically not suggesting that this has happened or indeed may happen in the future. I am merely pointing out that the conditions are present to make it possible.
 
rorydelargy said:
Headstrong,

<< the stats I have included are for Alastair's career as a licenced trainer ~ whether he was training for George Ward or Joe Bloggs is irrelevant and your reiteration of the phrase "in his own right" is entirely arbitrary.........

Your "correction" of the figures mentioned by me (and Spotlight) is both unnecessary and slightly embarrassing; to reiterate, the content was neither wrong nor misleading. I hope these are your views and not those of the trainer btw ~ >>


*I* felt what was written was unfair and misleading and that is just my personal opinion - Al would never venture an opinion on anything written about him, all that kind of thing just goes over his head. I never discussed it with him - tho I did have a brief conversation with his wife which is why she looked it up!

I take your points in some respect since as I've said I realise it's a difficult job to do in such a short timeframe; but it's not by any means the only time I've felt the Spotlight comments are unfair to a trainer I know (almost always smaller trainers btw) - this just happened to be a very recent example.

I don't agree the records of any 2yr olds Al trained for GW are relevant in the context of the Spotlight for Litenup, frankly.

Al went to GWs specifically to start buying in and training NH horses for him. He had never been near 2yr olds or ANY flat horses at that point in his career, which at that point had all been spent either as Asst Pupil to David Nicholson or as Asst for 8/9 years to Martin Pipe {After the GW stint he went as Asst to Paul Cole to remedy that gap, btw, which is where he met Hughie}.

I don't know where GW's 2yr olds at the time came from or what they were bought for, or by whom (though it was probably John Reid). Being a salaried trainer is a very different matter from 'training on your own account' as you must know - you don't necessarily have a choice of what to train, or even where to run! - esp with George - so my referencing that distinction was not 'entirely arbitrary', in fact I'd contend it was perfectly valid.

The writer also specified 'the yard' and not 'the trainer' so in that sense the comment should be judged in its own terms. I don't think 4 horses from 'the yard' is any sort of yardstick!

Sorry, but we will have to agree to differ here: I think my point was perfectly valid - which was that just plucking figure out of the RP database for Spotlight purposes can give a very misleading impression. I didn't use Al's name in the original post as I was making this as a *general* point - and I certainly didn't want to make it an argument about the record of one particular trainer. The impression given was that the trainer in question can't train 2yr olds, which *is* damaging and misleading. Imo!

In the instance of Kijivu, the RP reporter did use the words 'over jumps' and not 'over hurdles'. The mistake was corrected quickly however, online, and didn't appear in the print version - it's one which should not have been made though (it wasn't a spotlight btw, it was in the race report). We can all make mistakes writing to deadlines, but not all are potentially damaging if misleading.

Litenup btw was having a first run at a track close to home, no more than that as you would suppose from the competition.
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Headstrong said:
In the instance of Kijivu, the RP reporter did use the words 'over jumps' and not 'over hurdles'. The mistake was corrected quickly however, online, and didn't appear in the print version - it's one which should not have been made though (it wasn't a spotlight btw, it was in the race report). We can all make mistakes writing to deadlines, but not all are potentially damaging if misleading.
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In fairness, Headstrong, despite a being an avoidable mistake owing probably to sloppy research, it's surely a stretch to see it as "potentially damaging."
 
Headstrong said:
So SL, you can put your predictable cheap jibe back where it belongs!
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Dearie me, we ARE sensitive, aren't we? Headstrong, you started ripping into a spotlight writer for being wrong when you in fact were the one who was wrong. You simply can't expect people to constantly ignore inaccuracies like that, not least when it was the base of your initial criticism in the first place! These mistakes posted by you as absolute fact are getting to be bit of a habit, aren't they? (as I've already pointed out to you once tonight)
 
Shadow Leader said:
Dearie me, we ARE sensitive, aren't we? Headstrong, you started ripping into a spotlight writer for being wrong when you in fact were the one who was wrong. You simply can't expect people to constantly ignore inaccuracies like that, not least when it was the base of your initial criticism in the first place! These mistakes posted by you as absolute fact are getting to be bit of a habit, aren't they? (as I've already pointed out to you once tonight)
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Don't you be starting fights ~ you know what you're like :p
 
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