Across The Card Treble

What a great weekend for the yard with an across the card treble at Ascot and Haydock on Saturday.  The form of our runners from the weekend reads 111F220F0 - not bad by any means!  Ainsi Fideles (pictured above) and Unique de Cotte were most impressive at Ascot, both winning by six lengths and there are some shrewd judges that are tipping up Unique de Cotte to repeat the dose at the Cheltenham Festival.  Meanwhile Bygones Sovereign managed to make all the opposing jockeys look silly for a second consecutive weekend by jumping out and making all despite a 13lbs rise in the weights under another fine ride from Michael Heard.

I went to Wincanton with Martin and unfortunately we drew a blank, with a couple of seconds the best we could muster.  What is more, there was no cottage pie on offer in the Bathwick Tyres box.  We judged the best turned out and presented the winning prize for the Bathwick Tyres Kingwell Hurdle to Dan Skelton for Blue Heron.  I always thought that you gave the best looking girl the prize of best turned out...you learn something new everyday!

Courtlands Prince (pictured right) ran a good race to finish second at Wincanton for stable sponsors Wayne & Sarah Clifford of Bathwick Tyres.  Sarah bred him herself and is clearly the apple of her eye - she had everyone convinced (including Wayne) that he is a future Gold Cup winner.  I hope she is right!

Onto matters of today and there are three meetings taking place this afternoon with two jumps cards at Carlisle and Lingfield and an all-weather flat card from Wolverhampton.  The stable has no runners this weekend.

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How on earth can Ireland beat the West Indies in the Cricket World Cup?  Not only that, the Irish looked like the better team from the first ball - I wonder what the great Sir Gary Sobers would think?  He was a punting man and used to phone us up for tips back in the old days...not a lot of people know that!

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There were some strange results in the FA Cup matches at the weekend - Blackburn beat Stoke 4-1 while West Brom gave my beloved Hammers a 4-0 thrashing and Bradford beat Sunderland 2-0.  Tonight on BBC 1 it is the turn of Manchester United and Preston - yes, I will be sat in front of the television for the duration and hiding the remote!

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Strange but true...a health nut in Istanbul, Turkey aged 66 choked to death after trying to swallow a live fish - it was a killer mullet!