Horses for Sale
Seymourjohn (GB)
- Sunday, 06 July 2014 00:00
- Written by Chelsea Eggleton
Today there are just two meetings taking place - one on the flat at Ayr, while there is a National Hunt meeting at Market Rasen. The stable sends two runners to the jumps fixture; His Excellency who carries top weight in the 2m6f handicap chase and Weather Babe (picture above) who competes in the 2m5f handicap hurdle. Former amateur jockey turned conditional Michael Heard takes the ride aboard the latter and claims a handy 8lbs allowance from our mare's back. With 11-2 to carry I wouldn't be at all surprised to see her run a big race. Meanwhile His Excellency has the talent to run well and it will be interesting to see how he gets on over this longer trip.
I see that the Irish and French authorities have taken a proactive approach and are getting together to see how they can make the Irish Derby more competitive. When you have a horse like Australia in the line-up it does tend to scare plenty of the opposition off. It is always good for racing to have it's superstars and Australia is certainly one of those, but it can lead to some of the races becoming uncompetitve as his romp at the prohibitive odds of 1/8 would suggest. I am not sure there is an awful lot they can do other than move the time slot to before Epsom, but that would make it extremely early in the season - I am sure that winning trainer Aidan O'Brien would be more than happy to leave things as they are!
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I see that snappy Uruguayan striker Luis Suarez could be on his way to Barcelona for as much as £63 million. Suarez has a £70 million buyout clause in his Liverpool contract and it will be fascinating to see how he bonds with possible team-mate Lionel Messei - they are both goal scoring centre forwards. I hope he will accept Suarez as it would make for some really exciting football.
I would also be interested to know if Suarez will be allowed to keep 10% of his transfer fee? It's a nice way to earn a cool £6 or 7 million...get banned from the World Cup, fined £66,000 and then pick up several million. Something just doesn't add up for me.
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It is the British Grand Prix from Silverstone this afternoon at 1pm. Call me cynical, but I wonder who has been told they can win, Lewis Hamilton or Nico Rosberg? How can you have a sport where there are team orders like that...if either driver has aspirations to being World Champion then they should surely race flat-out to the finish. I have a mate who went to Silverstone last year and while he said there was a great atmosphere, you don't see very much as the cars go past so fast!
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