Saturday

Excellent thread. You should start more like this. Looks to be plenty of interesting and competitive handicaps, including a couple of good races over jumps.
 
Tomorrow is Golf day. I'm playing in the morning and watching in the afternoon.

Racing at the moment is all about the build up to the King George and Goodwood. I have no problem with the odd bad saturday.
 
Miserable gits - there are plenty of debut 2 y.o.'s to cast your eyes over as possible future bankables, or is that too onerous a task?
 
I ran off a copy of the terrestrial Tv races today. Ended up 'doing' just one race and might not have a bet. Strictly for the fanatics this weekend. Dreadful fare.
 
I'm with betsmate. Mentioned it on another thread, but it's a shocking state of affairs for a mid-summer Saturday.
 
Not happy to see High Standing running in the Shadwell Stakes as I have a lump on him for the Stewards Cup. That said, he has a favourite's chance in a weak looking Group 3 so i've taken some 4.7 on the machine.
 
Thread echoes my thoughts entirely. Hardly had the will to open the weekender all week. Possibly the least interesting Saturday of the season
 
Sometimes I wonder if anybody stops to think about how many top class horses (in their opinion, of course) are in training in this country? It seems strange that every year the top races (name any race you like - the Classics, the Gold Cup, Champion Hurdle) are being derided for being 'poor quality' this year and the horses 'this year' aren't much cop yet still everyone expects 'top class' (in whose opinion?!) cards with fields to match staged on every single Saturday and at every single big meeting, be it midweek or weekend. Not only that, the biggest races they expect to be contested by all the best of the best horses and moan that the fields for each race is 'crap' this year. So what is it to be? If there aren't so many top class horses around any more, how can you all expect so few animals to be spread so thinly or run so often that they fill up every Saturday, every big meeting (midweek and weekend) yet the best of the best are still saved up for the really big races? How many really good horses do you think we have in this country?
 
Bit of a strawman argument there, SL. The complaints in this thread are not about the quality of racehorses in Britain. Mine, certainly, is that it is a ridiculous situation that there is not a single race above Group 3 class in Britain, Ireland or France this weekend . There's a single Group 3 here, and a single Group 3 in France. Germany, at least, has a Group 1, but I don't even know if it's going to be on the box over here.

I think that's a failure in race planning across the board, given that it's the 18th of July and should be the height of the Flat season, and given that there are other points in the season where top races clash.

Pretty simple, really.
 
It's not necessarily 'top class' stuff we're looking for, though, SL. It's stuff that will grab out attention and keep us watching.

I have the TV races in front of me.

1. The summer hurdle. Off-season jumps sh*te.
2. The Shadwell. A dodgepots' convention.
3. A fillies and mares lottery.
4. Another fillies and mares lottery.
5. The 'Class 2' yet they can't get one above 89 to appear. (Why? Because it's only worth 12½ grand to the winner.)
6. The big 2yo race. One to watch but not to bet in.
7. The summer chase. See the summer hurdle.

Desperate stuff.

Clouds and silver linings, though. It will give me a break from watching and/or punting, and probably losing.

Of course, maybe the planners reckoned they weren't going to be able to compete with the Open...
 
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Maybe - but you have to have runners in those races. As you yourself can no doubt see, a lot of the horses that would be running in group races may have run at the recent July meeting, or the Eclipse meeting, or be aimed at next week's King George meeting, or Glorious Goodwood only two weeks away, or may have run in the group races in France during this week, or ran at The Curragh last weekend.

I'm not disputing that the race planning is awful; it is. However at some points in the season you are between big meetings or races that the better horses are being kept for. Don't let's forget that seemingly everyone moans when single figure group races are put on so it seems that no-one can be kept happy.
 
DO, the one word that keeps coming up is 'shite'. So what would the opposite to shite be? Not unreasonably, one would assume, top class. However, no matter what is put on, someone thinks it is shite since no-one can agree what is decent and what is not and has to moan on about it.
 
I'm not sure why they don't move the King George to this weekend and have a good gap between that meeting and Glorious Goodwood rather than one day off in between them.
 
Then everyone would be complaining that next week is 'shite' !!!

Look, sometimes we can't have group races all the time; there aren't enough horses to go around. It seems a bit much to expect 'quality' every single Saturday. Some Saturdays are going to be more average than others, so what? Have a day off, go shopping, whatever, if it's that bad.
 
Shadow Leader said:
DO, the one word that keeps coming up is 'shite'. So what would the opposite to shite be? Not unreasonably, one would assume, top class.
Click to expand...

Not unreasonable, perhaps, but not logical either. :)

Recognising sh*te when we see it is one thing. Wanting something better than sh*te is what it says on the tin. Give us something better. We don't need 'top class'.

The odd sh*te race I don't mind if it's supporting a better-than-sh*te race or races. We get sh*te at Royal Ascot too (usually wearing top hats or gaudy frocks). Sh*te is fine. It puts the non-sh*te into perspective. It allows us to appreciate the non-sh*te.

Do you think I'm talking sh*te?:)
 
Er, I hate to interrupt, but we are in with a chance of beating "The Great Sporting Nation" at Lords for the first time since 1934 (I remember it well) so I will not be paying attention to horses today!
 
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