Four Flat Cards Today

There are four flat meetings taking place this afternoon at Leicester, Chepstow, Windsor and Carlisle, while there is a valuable flat meeting taking place this afternoon in Ireland at Naas, so you are out of luck if you are a jumps fan.  The meeting at Naas is worth £243,000, not bad at all for a Monday afternoon.  Having said that, it doesn't quite compare to the pot landed by Japanese Derby winner One And Only who picked up a cool £1,326,909 at Tokyo yesterday.

The stable had one runner at Stratford on Saturday evening, Purple 'N Gold (pictured above, winning last time out) who finished a close fourth in the competitive handicap hurdle - I think that if he had jumped the last cleanly he would have finished at least second.  He looks well up to winning a race from his current mark of 116 and I am sure you will be seeing plenty more of him over the summer months.  Unsurprisingly, there are no runners from the stable today.

Looking at today's cards it is amazing to think that we are now in June and Chepstow are having to pass an inspection.  The ground will certainly be very testing for these flat boys.

I was shocked and saddened to hear of the death of Lambourn based flat trainer John Hills over the weekend.  At 53 years of age, he was far too young to be taken.  He was a really nice man who always took the time to speak to me whenever I saw him flat racing and he will be greatly missed by the entire racing community.

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I cannot see what all the fuss is about with the football World Cup going to Qatar.  Clearly there is more to this than meets the eye, I mean who in their right mind would have a World Cup in those sort of temperatures?  That is before you open the can of worms about the number of workers who have already lost their lives on the construction sites since they started preparations.  I have said for years that it is time that FIFA boss Sepp Blatter was given the boot.

I see that former England cricket all-rounder Andrew 'Freddie' Flintoff is hoping for a bonus.  Apparently he will pick up a £1 bonus for every fan over 12,000 present for his return for Lancashire against Yorkshire on Friday.  Lancashire are hoping for 20,000 people so that would equate to a £8,000 bonus for Flintoff.  Just think, the likes of Wayne Rooney wouldn't cross the road for that sort of money...these footballers do not know they have been born!

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What a great win for Carl Froch on Saturday night as he knocked out old adversary George Groves in the eighth round.  It looked like being quite a close bout until Froch caught Groves with a great punch.  I watched the fight at Pond House - can you believe that one of the gang even fell asleep?  I certainly thought that it was better than that!  Apparently, Froch wants one more fight in Las Vegas, that's his dream.

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