Two Runners At Southwell

The stable has two well-fancied runners at Southwell this afternoon - Battle Group and Mr Chow.  Battle Group was a very good hurdler, who won a Listed race at Aintree on Grand National day - he showed a good level of form when runner-up behind a useful type on his chasing debut at Wetherby, before blotting his copybook by unseating at the first at Towcester last time.  Conor O'Farrell takes over on board this afternoon.

The stable has two well-fancied runners at Southwell this afternoon - Battle Group and Mr Chow.  Battle Group (pictured right) was a very good hurdler, who won a Listed race at Aintree on Grand National day - he showed a good level of form when runner-up behind a useful type on his chasing debut at Wetherby, before blotting his copybook by unseating at the first at Towcester last time.  Conor O'Farrell takes over on board this afternoon.

Our other runner is Mr Chow who absolutely bolted up at Taunton last week and is turned out again quickly under a 7lbs penalty before the handicapper has a chance to reassess him.  Hopefully they can maintain the yard's good momentum.

The weather was appaling yesterday - despite passing an early morning inspection, Ayr still had to abandon their meeting for safety reasons owing to the high winds.  It was no great loss really when you consider the frankly pathetic levels of prize money that was up for grabs. The seven races were worth less than £25,000 in total, with four of them worth less than £2,000 to the winner.  It is hardly surprising that no southern based trainers would have been represented even if racing had gone ahead - if you won a race and then had to take travelling expenses out of it, you would probably be out of pocket.  If the owners and trainers are struggling, who is making all the money from horse racing?...I will leave it to you to work that one out!

It wasn't just the north of the country that suffered from the inclement weather yesterday - the roof was blown off of one of the stands at Epsom, meaning that the staff had to be evacuated.

*****

I always enjoy looking through the statistics pages and was interested to see that Timmy Murphy has an impressive 36% strike rate when teaming up with David.  The only more productive partnership in the top 50 of the jockeys' championship is Barry Geraghty who boasts a 41% strike rate when riding for Nicky Henderson.