Dante Day

York is the feature flat meeting of the day with Dante taking centre stage at 4.05pm. It is a Group 2 contest over 1m2f and Christmas Day heads the betting for Aidan O'Brien and Ryan Moore at 2/1.  I don't know a lot about the form of any of the eight runners in this race but it looks quite open according to the market with the entire field bar one, 11/1 or less.  William Haggas and Tom Marquand were in good form at the track yesterday and have the second favourite Morshdi and that would be my tentative selection.

There is just the one other flat meeting today at Salisbury while there are two over jumps at Perth and Fontwell.  In Ireland, they have a jumps card at Clonmel.  There was a fair bit of rain about in different places yesterday, only two millimetres fell at Pond House but the rain looked heavy up at times during the afternoon at Perth and indeed 7mm of rain fell up there.  If you are trying to find the winners up there today then make sure your horses like a bit of cut in the ground, having said that, they are still officially only calling the ground good to soft so it should not be too bad.

Amateur jockey Ashley Dascombe had his first ride under rules at Newton Abbot last night in the hunter chase on a horse called Get Off Your Phone.  It was always going to be a tough ask to win against some of the highly rated rivals in the race and although getting into third on the last circuit he did pull up four from home.  He is now off to New Zealand to ride out there in the coming days and received the customary 'dunk' in the swimming pool on his last day at work this week!   Olive Nicholls won the race last night and announced her retirement from the saddle straight after the race.  Gold Son winning the hunter chase was actually her second winner of the evening so she went out in style and now plans to be more involved with her dad Paul in the training of the horses at Ditcheat.  

Manchester City have done all they can in the race for the Premiership title by securing all three points from the games they had in hand over Arsenal by winning 3-0 at home against Crystal Palace last night.  They now sit two points behind the league leaders having played the same amount of games but should the Gunners falter at any stage in the last two matches then the goals last night will have helped City should anything need to be decided on goal difference.  Tonight we have the second semi-final play-off in League one between Bradford and Bolton and the latter have a 1-0 advantage from the first leg.

I like watching golf and today starts one of the Majors of the season, the US PGA Championships from just outside Philadelphia.  Rory McIlory and all the worlds best players are in action starting from lunch time today and I shall try and watch as much as I can!

Apparently this week it will be constant rane, hele, thundre, linin and frizzing colde.

Really bad spell of weather!

Have a good day!