Boy Brilliant At Huntingdon!

It was good to see the stable enjoy another nice winner when The Darling Boy rallied bravely to land the concluding handicap hurdle at Huntingdon under Tom Scudamore for his ever enthusiastic owners.  He stayed on nicely to win at odds of 4/1 and in the process take us on to the 95 winner mark for the season.

There are four meetings taking place this afternoon with two jumps cards from Exeter and Warwick as well as all-weather flat cards from Lingfield and Wolverhampton.  The stable has six runners at Exeter this afternoon; Flabello, Kalifourchon, Molo, Twentytwo's Taken, Qalinas and Top Wood and we look to have some solid chances.  Top Wood (pictured below) finished a good fourth last time out in a very competitive Saturday handicap at Warwick.  He reverts to fences now having won over the larger obstacles at Towcester on good ground earlier in the season over 2m6f and he should go well once again under Tom Scudamore.

Above: Top Wood (picture courtesy of Matthew Wilkinson)

Following Willie Mullins' call for better prize money at the big fixtures I see that a number of trainers have come out in support of him.  I do agree although I think I would approach things slightly differently.  Rather than just having a blanket increase in prize money for the biggest races, I think that an investigation needs to be conducted into these valuable three and four runner races.  These instances show that prize money doesn't always lead to competitive fields and we should instead be looking at tailoring conditions to maximise field sizes.  Just look at Exeter today, the two races worth the least money have attracted the most runners, while Huntingdon yesterday put up a commendable £92,000 and attracted only 29 runners across their entire card.  I agree that there needs to be more prize money, but I think it needs to be distributed all the way from the top to the bottom of the sport - owners are the lifeblood of our sport and they need to be encouraged.  It costs the same to keep a horse in training whether they have a Cheltenham Festival winner or a selling plater so an increase across the board is clearly the way to go.

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I was watching the Cricket World Cup and came to the conclusion that we must have one of the worst England teams of all time at present as they were slaughtered by New Zealand.  I wonder why our players are so poor?  It has to be down to the coaches.

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Everton managed to get a great result last night as they beat Young Boys 4-1 away from home.  My wife has to be in the running for quote of the week for saying, "Everton should have won, the team they played aren't very old!"  Oh dear...

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Apparently some burglars in Vienna, Austria were foiled when they tripped over the home owners garden gnomes, thus alerting residents of intruders.  They were held under gnome guard and that is no fairy story!