Twelve to follow

5 December 2009

Advice should always be received cautiously.

I wouldn’t follow him regularly but King’s Old Benny, who missed last season but previously won the Cheltenham Festival four-miler, could be one for the Grand National. My long-term ideas for that race include Nigel Twiston-Davies’s Irish Raptor, and Tricky Trickster, who is now with champion trainer Paul Nicholls, a man hungry to win his first National.

Timeform’s invaluable guide Chasers and Hurdlers 2008/09 (Portway Press, £70) notes that Tricky Trickster, who was unsold at £1,800 when offered as a foal, was then bought for £8,000 as a four-year-old, for £40,000 after winning a point-to-point and finally sold on for £320,000 a little over a year later. So much for recession. You may not always get a generous price on Paul’s horses but you have to have a Nicholls horse in the dozen: try his novice chaser Definity.

Owner Paul Green has moved Phidippides from Nicholls to Evan Williams, and the Presenting gelding could scarcely have looked better, winning his first hurdle race on 12 November.

Lucy Wadham’s hurdler El Dancer will win a decent prize if he gets a fast-run race and I must include a horse from the advancing stable of Martin Keighley. As a jockey he rode only nine winners but he has already trained 18 this season. His Wolf Moon looks the sort for the Coral Cup but I will go for Any Currency, a tough stayer who will make a grand chaser. You need improving horses. Two from Philip Hobbs in that category are Clova Island, who will start in handicap hurdles and then go chasing, and Quinz.

Finally, we must have a pair from Ireland. Willie Mullins could win races at a decent price with Lios A Choill, a novice hurdler who should make up into a chaser. The price has gone now on Noel Meade’s Go Native, a 25–1 winner of the Fighting Fifth Hurdle, so let us take instead his possibly underrated Muirhead.

And how about the summer Twelve? Between them they ran 33 times, producing six victories, seven seconds and five third places. Best of the wins was King’s Apostle’s 7–1 victory in the Prix Maurice de Gheest. Confront won three times and had he not gone down by just half a length to Aqlaam, subsequent winner of the Prix du Moulin, we would have been in profit. As it is we were down just on £100 to a £10 level win stake. Each-way backers might have had some consolation when Roses for the Lady took second place at 33–1 in the Irish Oaks.