England Underway Tonight

There are four meetings taking place this afternoon, while there is the small matter of England's opening match of their World Cup campaign.  The racing takes place on the level at Carlisle, Ayr, Nottingham and Windsor so if you are a fan of the jumps you are out of luck.  There was a thrilling finish to the charity flat race at York on Saturday with a dead-heat between Sarah Fanning and Chris Brownlese.  The big winner on the day though was Macmillan who raised nearly £½million which has to be considered a great result for a fantastic cause.

I see that it is Danny Cook's birthday today.  Danny worked at Pond House for several years and rode plenty of winners, including Great Endeavour who was a Cheltenham Festival winner for him.  The Post says that he was the rider of Our Vic, well we would certainly like a few more like him.  Meanwhile, it is also Brod Munro-Wilson's birthday - he is 73 today and those older readers may recall him riding a horse called The Drunken Duck.  I think the horse was probably named after Brod!

There is a great pullout in today's edition of the Racing Post about Royal Ascot which gets underway tomorrow.  David has a runner in the Ascot Stakes as new recruit Percy Street takes his chance under Oisin Murphy.  David won the race in 2010 with Junior.

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I will be glued to the television tonight as England get their World Cup competition underway with their match against Tunisia.  It is on BBC1 at 7pm and England are a best priced 4/9 to win - let's hope that they put up a good performance and get a result.  Mexico beat reigning champions Germany 1-0 last night, while Switzerland drew 1-1 with Brazil.  Most of the players that compete for these small countries already play abroad so there aren't really any bad teams in the competition anymore.

Koedka was the winner of the US Open golf at the weekend but the round of the day came from Tommy Fleetwood who shot a superb 63 to finish second.  Butch Harmond summed the course up to a tee by saying, "All you needed was an alligator on the green and if you got the ball in his mouth you won a prize!"  It sounds like he is implying that it was like crazy golf.

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Thought for the day: You are not completely useless...you can always serve as a bad example!  Keep smiling...

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