End Of Another Season

Faasel has now had four runs since arriving at Pond House and has twice finished runner-up in the Kim Muir Handicap Chase at the Cheltenham Festival, as well as filling the runner-up spot in the Bet365. Hopefully, his turn in the winners’ enclosure will not be far away.

We didn’t sign off empty handed however, and Matuhi won the valuable 2m4f handicap chase up at Haydock under an excellent ride from Hadden Frost. His win took us to a final tally of 65 winners on the season and left us just an agonising £58 short of accumulating £1million in prize money.

As racing enthusiasts will know, there never seems to be much let up in the pace, and on Monday I flew across to Ireland to visit Fairyhouse and oversee our Irish National runner Or Noir de Somoza. Unfortunately he couldn’t reach the placings and may still have been remembering his experience at Aintree a few weeks earlier when he was an unlucky faller at Beechers Brook when left with nowhere to go. I thought that Nina Carberry was fantastic aboard the winner, Organised Confusion – she really is a phenomenon, and as Chester points out, it is easy to forget that she is still an amateur.

The new season in Britain follows hot on the heels of the old and we had our first winner of the new campaign when Lucy’s Perfect scored in good style at Exeter on Tuesday under sixteen times champion jockey A P McCoy. A P’s achievements are legendary and there is little sign of him letting go of his title any time soon. We sent him our congratulations earlier in the week for surpassing dad’s fifteen trainer’s championships, although he still has a little way to go to get to the 4182 winners that my father produced!

Lucy's Perfect gives us our first winner of the season at Exeter on Tuesday

The flat season gets into full swing this weekend with Newmarket’s Guineas meeting and like everyone else, my eyes will be fixed on Henry Cecil’s Frankel…it would be fantastic to see him handling another equine megastar this season. Next week we will be looking to defend our Chester Cup crown when Mamlook lines up again at the Roodeye. We have once again booked Richard Hughes for the mount and hope that he can repeat his performance of twelve months ago.

It certainly looks like being a busy week as we will also be having runners in Ireland for the Punchestown Festival while we may also be journeying over to France for some of their valuable races…hear about it first here!