Ireland’s love affair with horse racing

With the Cheltenham Festival close, the quest for serious punting money intensifies. I had one potential contributor identified at Kempton on Saturday. With trainer Dan Skelton on red-hot form, and his jockey brother Harry currently winning on 22 per cent of his rides, I reckoned that their candidate for the Sky Bet Dovecote Novices’ Hurdle, the clearly useful Calico, a decent horse on the Flat in Germany, was the business at a tasty 10-3.

Three hurdles out, Harry had Calico travelling strongly behind the two leaders and I was not only counting my money but also starting to frame a few ante-post doubles for the Festival. When he eased into second at the second last, and the pair pulled clear of the field, it seemed only a matter of time before he swooped on the leader Cape Gentleman. But when Harry gave Calico the get-go, and rode him hard to challenge after the last, Cape Gentleman wasn’t ready to yield. In the hands of Jonjo O’Neill junior he stuck out his neck and battled ferociously to fight off his challenger by three quarters of a length.

Cape Gentleman could clearly stay, having won the Irish Cesarewitch on the Flat, and it was a classic duel between two good horses who will both surely go on to better things. Calico did hit the second last and he turned out to have lost a shoe, but I’m not sure that affected the result. I had made a classic mistake: never underestimate the Irish threat. Emmet Mullins, Cape Gentleman’s trainer, has sent only 15 horses to run in Britain over five seasons and now six of them have won.

Largely thanks to Covid, we haven’t seen too many Irish raiders on British courses this season but British punters got it wrong big time in the £100,000 Caspian Caviar Gold Cup in December when Mick Winters, the County Cork man whose glorious accent has interviewers pleading for subtitles, won the big race by 15 lengths with the 16-1 shot Chatham Street Lad and then made good his promise to roll in the parade ring mud if he won.