Little Warmer

The first signs of the weather changing were evident this morning, despite there being a hard frost still and perhaps a sprinkling of snow overnight, the temperature gauge has risen from minus 8 yesterday to minus 1 this morning.  Not that I can really feel an improvement, sadly my boiler has stopped working when I got home from work last night so it was a pretty chilly evening for me last night, where it even felt warmer outside than it did in!  There were further problems on the race track last night when Kempton had to abandon racing after two races with freezing fog causing poor visibility the reasoning.

Hopefully there will be two all-weather fixtures taking place today with the absence of any jumping in Britain and Ireland.  ITV4 will be broadcasting from Lingfield should it pass it's 7.30am inspection and from Chelmsford if it passes it's 8.30am check.  While Monday's card at Muselburgh has been called off, they are hopeful of hosting the first jumps racing in over a week at Lingfield on Monday.  The covers are down at the track at the moment and they plan to leave these down until Sunday afternoon when their temperatures are set to rise.  Declarations take place this morning so we may have a few stable runners to look forward to on Monday.

The BHA have re-arranged the Long Walk hurdle that was due to be run at Ascot today, to be run at Kempton on Boxing Day.  While we are not involved in this race itself it is great they have re-scheduled it and it just begs the question why this can not be done more often?  If the race had taken place today we would have seen the re-match between Champ and two time winner of the race Paisley Park.  The duo produced an epic finish at Newbury last time out and fingers crossed both horses might turn up at Kempton.  The BHA have also put on two extra fixtures this week, with a meeting at Hereford on Wednesday and at Ffos Las on Thursday.  Entries close this morning and it a great we have got some meetings to replace some of the ones lost since the big freeze started.  There is also rain in the forecast in the coming days which is also needed so fingers crossed things look all set for a bumper Christmas period for racing.

Today we have the third place play off between Morocco and Croatia in the World Cup in Qatar.  Morocco are the first African team to have got to this stage and I have enjoyed watching them play.  I was just hearing earlier also that in this World Cup, it is the first time a nation from each of the five continents have made it through to the knock out stages of the competition.  I'm not sure what this tells you but I guess it highlights the good standard of football that can be found across the World.  I think it will be a close game this afternoon and even though my heart says a win for Morocco as they have been a more entertaining team to watch, my head says Croatia will get the win.  I will not be watching however as straight after work I am going to watch the Exeter Chiefs rugby game at Sandy Park.  They play The Vodacom Bulls in the Champions Cup.  It has been a while since I have been to watch them play but they look to have a strong team out today with some of the international players back like Henry Slade and Luke Cowan-Dickie.  Fingers crossed I can be cheering on a home win!

I only know 25 letters in the alphabet, I don't know 'y'!  Have a good day.