Diamond Geezer
Gone But Not Forgotten
- Joined
- May 2, 2003
- Messages
- 13,884
The going at Newbury ahead of the Ladbrokes Winter Carnival is now good to soft all over after 11.5mm of rain in 24 hours
Was reading your post DO & the first thing I thought before I read the 2nd paragraph was that Marble should have been concerned if trainer had been more positive about its chances (he said diplomatically).
The only thing I am worried about is trainers paranoya about soft ground for Dingo Dollar ,especially given he won on soft by 15 lengths at Newbury over fences last season. The last quote I read from Alan King was positive - He said Dingo Dollar had worked well.
Good news for Marble...
Dingo Dollar is the headline tip in the Weekender. Paul Kealy seems to really fancy it but Alan King is more circumspect about tipping it although in my opinion he does have a record when it comes to putting readers of his column away.
As an aside, I really don't see the point of allowing trainers a newspaper column if they aren't going to be 100% straight with what they say.
Anthony Honeyball (stable tour feature) says Ms Parfois has been trained for the race but might miss it depending on the ground.
Don't think anything has won this race on its first race of the season for bloody years
Not sure if you already know Martin but Kealey has tipped DD in this week's Weekender. Never a bad thing but it'll affect his SP so I hope you're already on.
[/B]
Ms Parfois
AJH: Still a touch wishy-washy regarding plans. I'm tempted, if it's heavy ground, I'd be tempted to run her in the Betfair chase only if you can take the quality out of race. Obviously it’d still be a quality race, but if you could take the speed and the quality out of the race and just make it an end to end gallop, a bit of a slog, over three miles on heavy ground, then that might be a good £200,000 race. Small field, might be a race we'd take in as a sort of win-win really. If she goes and does win or finishes second or third, we've picked up big prize money and so what if we go up the handicap a bit? And if she doesn't get that competitive, she'll probably stay off her mark and it'll be a good prep run for the Welsh National. That's half the plan.
The other half is to run her in the Ladbroke, possibly first time out, straightaway in the Ladbroke and then you've got the option of Welsh National, but it's not likely that you can… It has been backed up before, but you would, obviously, take… I'd just be very happy, and obviously if she could finish in the frame or win Ladbroke, I wouldn't be worried about if she's going to go in the Welsh National. But we can tie those two December races within that timeframe. There's the Becher Chase at Aintree on 8 December as well.
There's so many around that time, it's just hard. There's a lovely 30 grand mares’ race at Newbury, the one she won last year, which was novice last year, now it's the normal mares’ Listed event over three miles at Newbury and I'm now probably pencilling in Midnight Tune for that this season if I can get her there, but that's another race for Ms Parfois and it all comes at the same time, so it's going to be hard to sort of keep going through. Definitely want to make her seasonal debut in November and that might just end up at the Betfair. It depends what the ground does really, if we don’t get the ground there. But we might wait that one out and head there and then if it doesn't come right, we might wait the extra… We'd have to wait another week or so and we can get the Hennessy… Sorry, the Ladbroke. So that might be, the Ladbroke chase, might end up being the target.
Trainer A.Honeyball.
I've taken another nibble at my top-rated Flying Angel at 33/1.
I think that race at Ascot last week was hotter than I'd anticipated and the handicapper appears to agree, hiking the winner 9lbs and Flying Angel 4lbs so he'll be that much well in on Saturday, getting to race off 142, compared with the 157 he went up to for beating Cloudy Dream (then 153, subsequently 159) and Top Notch (158, 164) in the big Aintree novices chase in 2017.
Flying Angel had a dismal time of it last season but last week was a big step forward from his seasonal debut behind Frodon. With Go Conquer very weak in the market it looks like he'll be the stable's main hope.
Assuming he runs, of course...
I am hoping isleofhopeanddreams turns up..might not be WPM number 1 in the betting but could be number 1 home
4/9 SoftHopefully the rain will stop soon! Worst case scenario is soft ground I hope?