Buffalo At Huntingdon

There are four meetings taking place this afternoon, three over the sticks at Huntingdon, Sedgefield and Lingfield as well as a flat card at Wolverhampton.  The stable has just the one runner, Broadway Buffalo (pictured above) who participates in the 2.10pm race at Huntingdon.  It's a good race with £15,000 in prize money up for grabs and our runner is 1lbs higher than when finishing a close fourth in the ultra competitive Silver Trophy at Chepstow last time.  A similar level of form will see him go close under Tom Scudamore.

Yesterday's runner, Buddy Bolero was beaten only a neck in the graduation chase at Carlisle - unfortunately a slightly slower leap at the last possibly made the difference between winning and losing.  He appeared to handle the heavy ground very well and there are obviously more races in him this term.

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I see that Sue Smith was fined £3,000 for schooling in public at Southwell yesterday. The jockey in question was banned for 18 days and the horse, Emral Silk was banned from racing for 40 days.  He was taken wide the whole way and never put in the race - I'm afraid it didn't look good.  Personally, I don't know why some of the racecourses don't stage schooling races after racing.  They could charge the trainers who want to school their horses and make a little money for the track, while the trainers will be paying a lot less than £3,000!  Everyone's a winner as far as I can see...or maybe I am missing something?!

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If you missed it yesterday, below is another opportunity to catch travelling head lad, Craig Wylie's video interview with broadcasting legend Mike Vince...

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I watched Novak Djokovic beat Rafa Nadal in the ATP world tour finals yesterday.  The Serb has now won 22 matches on the trot and looks to be at the top of his game.  There seems to be only three or four players who carve up all of the tennis tournaments and it makes me wonder why the sport is so uncompetitive outside of the very upper echelons of the game.  Take golf or snooker, there are so many players that can win tournaments on any given day - just look at the Frenchman who won his first tournament in the Turkish Open golf at the weekend - this would never happen in tennis.

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I see that Frank Lampard will captain England against Chile on Friday night on his 100th appearance for his country.  I knew his dad (also named Frank) quite well back in my East end days.  He was a full back who never took any prisoners!