Sam Thomas

Does that mean if he is dropped from Nicholls we should back him next season for the jockey's championship?
 
Gareth, the unseat was a classic Thomas cockup - they're becoming more and more regular.

As I said, he seems unable to keep a hold on a horses head - it's one of the first things they teach 6 year old kids when learning to ride/jump, for goodness' sake!

It's such a basic, basic thing and if he were to think about it and keep hold of them a bit more he'd stop falling off so much. He gives the horses no assistance from the saddle over an obstacle at all - the only reason people rate him is because he can manage to steer around those straightforward, good jumpers with whom he only has to point and shoot. He's not a horseman in the slightest and he is getting worse, too. I haven't been calling him the horse wrestler for ages now just for the sake of it!
 
Shadow Leader said:
Gareth, the unseat was a classic Thomas cockup - they're becoming more and more regular.

As I said, he seems unable to keep a hold on a horses head - it's one of the first things they teach 6 year old kids when learning to ride/jump, for goodness' sake!

It's such a basic, basic thing and if he were to think about it and keep hold of them a bit more he'd stop falling off so much. He gives the horses no assistance from the saddle over an obstacle at all - the only reason people rate him is because he can manage to steer around those straightforward, good jumpers with whom he only has to point and shoot. He's not a horseman in the slightest and he is getting worse, too. I haven't been calling him the horse wrestler for ages now just for the sake of it!
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With this kind of insight it makes you wonder why they haven't dumped him already or even bothered to take him on in the first place.
They obviously know f#ck all at Ditcheat.
 
Maybe you're not wrong, Hutchy!

Seriously, he's terrible. You can't expect to continually make the same basic errors when jumping an obstacle and continue to hold down such a job. I really do think that he's going to start losing rides at Ditcheat, starting with Master Minded next week.
 
I can't be bothered to go through Thomas's rides this year, and don't have raceform interactive (even if I did I doubt I could operate it) but if we accept frequency of unseating as an indication of jockeyship/ horsemanship then I'll refer you to a table Nick Mordin produced a few years back where he took 3 years worth of rides and expressed UR's as a percentage. Unfortunately I can only draw on the last 2 weeks so its not a fair sample and more of a snapshot, but here goes,

Fitzgerald = 1.2%
Carberry = 1.5%
Fenton = 1.6%
Crowley = 1.9%
McCoy = 2.0%
Thornton R = 2.0%
Johnson = 2.2%
Thornton A = 2.2%
Williamson = 2.2%
Dobin = 2.3%
Marston = 2.3%
Walsh = 2.6%
Culloty = 2.9%
Greene = 3.9%
Lee = 4.0%
Gerraghty = 4.0%
Durrack = 5.1%
Fehily = 5.2%
THOMAS = 6.25%

The last two weeks are of course a convenient sample to pick Thomas on, and you might say that he's only unseated 3 times (it just so happens he's done it on 3 high profile horses, 2 of which he's cost them at least a place) but that's beside the point. His performance in the last 2 weeks amounts to 6.25%, even if you forgive him Gwanko its 4.2%, but having said that, some of those in the list above will have been victim of unrideable horses, so you might leave Gwanko in.
 
Cheers Warbler - even though that's only for the last two weeks, it pretty much shows what I'm trying to say!

I wouldn't have him ride my bike - in all seriousness, I'd rather ride one myself than put him up on a fancied one of mine even though I wouldn't want to ride it and risk cocking up in the first place!
 
Should Joe Tizzard ride Masterminded then?
He knows the Nicholls set up and is a more than capable No2 to Walsh
 
No Christian Williams will be ask to ride them in future, he has no retainer and his freelance having been number two, prior to his horrendous injury, at Ditcheat .......
 
Ugh, Tizzard is nearly as bad!!!

Christ knows what it is with Nicholls and his tendency to side with appalling jockeys - Tizzard, Thomas, even Williams isn't my cup of tea although he's been riding better lately.
 
Warbler said:
THOMAS = 6.25%

The last two weeks are of course a convenient sample to pick Thomas on, and you might say that he's only unseated 3 times (it just so happens he's done it on 3 high profile horses, 2 of which he's cost them at least a place) but that's beside the point. n.
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This is the whole point though.

Yes - Thomas isn't riding with much confidence now and I wouldn't defend some of his rides over the last couple of weeks.

But - he isn't a bad jockey, far from it - in the same way that Paul Nicholls isn't suddenly a bad trainer because he has had a lean spell. Why is it that people have such difficulty seeing beyond the last few results?

Last year Paul Nicholls was a genius (comparable to Rembrandt according to one lunatic in the RP) and Sam Thomas was a better jockey than Ruby after he had ridden Denman to victory a couple of times. Now Thomas can't ride to save his life, Nicholls is washed up and Henderson is flavour of the month. FFS - perspective please!
 
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tdk said:
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Why is it that people have such difficulty seeing beyond the last few results?
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Because (as I said at the outset) I'm not prepared to expend the time necessary to trawl back through 3 years of every ride that Thomas has had and calculate the percentage of UR's in order to make the figures 'like for like'. If you want to do that yourself then I look forward to seeing the results in 3 months time. So, for the time being all I can do is use the 2 week summary on the RP website and acknowledge its limitations (as I did - though describing it as being beside the point was clumsy). We might choose to perform the calculation every two weeks and keep a running score going? 3 from 48 is the current total. Alternatively, if someone does have raceform interactive and can get the information in a matter of minutes, then I think we'd all find the results interesting.

As an aside, some of you will doubtless have read the book where i lifted the survey from and therefore know the answer, so please relent. Those of you who don't might like to try something else?.

Mordin also noted the frequency of close finishes the jockeys were involved in (2L's or less discounting wound down performances) see if you can rank in order, or nominate the top 5 and bottom 5 in terms of who had the best and worst percentage S/R in prevailing at the business end? or to use a phrase so familiar to us, who was 'strongest and weakest' in a finish
 
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That list shows something that really annoys me about racing analysis, those people that don't have the aptitude to read a race looking at numbers and spreadsheets to tell them something that if they watch a race they should be able to see as plain as the nose on their face. Andrew Thornton as a better rider than Ruby tells me more than I need to know about how reliable that table is as an indicator of levels of jockeyship.
 
Warbler said:
Mordin also noted the frequency of close finishes the jockeys were involved in (2L's or less discounting wound down performances) see if you can rank in order, or nominate the top 5 and bottom 5 in terms of who had the best and worst percentage S/R in prevailing at the business end? or to use a phrase so familiar to us, who was 'strongest and weakest' in a finish
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Another lot of meaningless statistics. The style of McCoy would always ensure that he would be involved in more close finishes than other riders, merely because he'd get them closer than other jockeys who wouldn't have their rides brought into the debate.
 
Thanks for standing my corner Grey! I guess I owe you a drink now......:p

He is right though, I've been saying for a while now that I don't rate Thomas and have been referring to him as the 'horse wrestler' for some time. I just don't think he is capable of riding them over an obstacle properly which is half the job in NH racing!
 
davidjohnson said:
Andrew Thornton as a better rider than Ruby tells me more than I need to know about how reliable that table is as an indicator of levels of jockeyship.
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I believe those figures (apart from the Sam Thomas ones, obviously) are from a good few years back - 5 at the very least if they're from the 2003 edition of Betting for a Living, which I think they are.

I think Warbler's point is that they provide a frame of reference for what should be expected from a top-class jockey rather than any concrete truths. Which they do. The thing to look at is not that Thornton has a tiny 0.4% better record than Walsh, but that Thomas' percentage is so much higher than the established frame.

Of course, as Warbler admits, the selective sample size for Thomas' stats makes the whole thing a tad dubious to say the very least!
 
The list would be close to 10 years old, probably generated over the period 1999 - 2003 and in all probability earlier, so there's every chance you're picking up on the performance of a reasonably young Ruby Walsh. There's always ways to explain the unexpected, (as I believe there is for the top jockey in a finish etc)

A jockey who rides aggresively is more likely to get unseated than one who doesn't (Thornton). You can of course cross reference that against win S/R's. In this case Fitz would score on both counts, where as Thornton wouldn't. I'm no judge of jockeyship (unless it blindingly obvious) but I've heard enough people tell me that Andrew Thornton is technically quite good, but that he lacks things like flare and instinct. I guess its not dissimilar to something like cricket? (another stats game). You can have players who possess a perfectly sound technique, but who never seem to convert this into performances that their technique suggests they should do? Invariably there's something missing, probably that indefinable things called 'class', or it could be mental?

With this mind, you have to view the overall rankings together that takes in things like % wins in a close finish, the % of times they encountered traffic problems, the number of times a horse was reported to have hung and thus not been kept straight. I'm a bit nervous about the assertion that the lower percentage you PU is a reflection on your ability to settle the horse etc, I think it reflects the horses ability as much as anything, although I'll accept there's a kind of link as most races involve horses of broadly similar abilities, so a PU is relative.
 
You cross posted me Gareth, but the answers yes, they are from the 2003 edition. Given that his gambling systems in the same book were drawn from the mid to late 90's, I suspect that these stats might well be too.
 
The Times is reporting it is very likely McCoy will ride Master Minded with Thomas on Twist Magic or off to Chepstow.
 
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