The fun of the Shergar Cup

Gary Lineker once summed up football as ‘a simple game. Twenty-two men chase a ball for 90 minutes and at the end, the Germans always win.’ Ascot’s Dubai Duty Free Shergar Cup, a team contest in which four teams of three international jockeys, one of them restricted to female riders, compete for points on randomly drawn horses, is going the same way.

In this month’s contest the Ladies team, led as usual by everybody’s favourite girl next door Hayley Turner and including Yorkshire’s Joanna Mason, won for the fourth time in six years. Hayley herself triumphed in two of the six races and for the third time collected the Alistair Haggis Silver Saddle for the most points.

I won’t ever be a total fan of team horseracing , which is almost a contradiction in terms, but after 23 years the Shergar Cup has somehow become a fun fixture in my diary. It is always interesting to see international stars in action who this year included Rachel Venniker, the only female professional rider in South Africa, and Bauyrzhan Murzabayev who started in long-distance races aged seven in his native Kazakhstan and has been four times champion jockey in Germany. Nothing though could have been more appropriate in this year’s Shergar Cup races than Hayley Turner’s success.

Ascot is a tricky course which she rides as well as anybody. In the two mile Stayers race she led all the way on Andrew Balding’s Ranch Hand, was headed shortly before the post but had kept enough in Ranch Hand’s tank and her own to come again and grab the race on the line from Seamie Heffernan on Beamish.