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Horses For Courses: Cough bug adds to Nicholls’ woes
Jockey Ruby Walsh riding Zarkandar (right) clears the last behind 2nd placed Get Me Out of Here ridden by Maurice Linehan but goes on to win The Betfair Hurdle during the Betfair Free Friday at Newbury. PIC: PA
It’s just 19 days to go until day one of the Cheltenham Festival – and I’m guessing my VIP invite is still in the post.
Or not, but on a serious note, the news that Paul Nicholls has horses coughing in his yard must be a concern and here’s hoping the champ has his string back in rude health for Tuesday, March 13.
Nicholls, a regular user of Twitter, admitted that Saturday was one of his worst days ever as a trainer with even the fact that the Ditcheat handler had not had a single winner from 16 runners failing to tell the full tale.
That fact alone is staggering and worrying –- Nicholls usually has around a 23 per cent strike rate and we must also remember that eight of his weekend runners were favourite or second favourite.
But it got worse with one of those – the likeable The Minack – suffering a nasty fall at Ascot with Nicholls revealing afterwards to his near 40,000 followers on Twitter that the eight-year-old had suffered a “serious career- threatening injury”.
“Not a great day,” the champion trainer added, though one of the Channel 4 Racing presenters said that Nicholls had said that it was one of his worst days ever.
Ironic
There can’t be many days where he has drawn a blank from so many runners and while terrible timing, the news emerging on Monday that several horses in his yard were coughing came as no surprise, not when you consider that over the weekend as a whole the Ditcheat handler had just one winner from 31 runners.
How ironic that that particular winner was last week’s big Horses For Courses fancy Zarkandar and how good he must be is another tale altogether.
How much you make of the news that Nicholls admitted that several of his horses are coughing is open to debate but it’s certainly not a positive with the Festival so near.
It is the four days of racing that every trainer gears their big hopes towards and obviously the aim is to approach the Festival on the crest of a wave and not on a downer.
It must be stressed that Nicholls also revealed that only “around a dozen” were coughing but given the desperate results at the weekend it seems that more than that, to a degree, are under the weather.
Nicholls still has a whole host of horses entered over the next few days so is far from shutting up shop temporarily but it will be fascinating to monitor the Nicholls runners over the next week or so because there is no doubting the significance if his yard is out of form at Cheltenham.
Of the ante-post betting races, Nicholls trains eight runners that are either very well fancied favourites or second favourites.
Big Buck’s is clearly the main biggy and the awesome hurdler would probably still win if he had a devastating cold, never mind a cough.
That’s not to say that Big Buck’s is one of the dozen or so that are coughing but, nonetheless, he can now be backed at 8-13 with SportingBet.
Assuming the champion trainer gets his team over this little stumbling block that could look an absolute steal.
the other main Nicholls hope is Kauto Star –- 7-2 second favourite for the Gold Cup behind Long Run–- but other ante-post market leaders are Harry The Viking (8-1 fav for National Hunt Challenge Cup), Prospect Wells (14-1 fav for County Hurdle) and Ted Spread (12-1 for Conditionals Handicap Hurdle).
They might seem juicy prices for favourites but they will be a lot shorter than that on the day.
then there are the likes of Al Ferof (11-2 for the Arkle), Zarkandar (6-1 for the Champion Hurdle) and the fascinating Rocky Creek (10-1 for the Albert Bartlett).
In light of the coughing issue, Nicholls, who has been leading trainer at the Festival six times, was pushed out by every bookmaker to a best-priced 5-2 to scoop that gong behind Willie Mullins (11-8) and Nicky Henderson (9-4), but the cool-as-ice Ditcheat man said on Tuesday that there was “no need to panic”.
My money is on him bouncing back in style and let’s just hope so.
After all, the Festival is hard enough without having that quandary to size up as well.
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