Thursday, May 23, 2013

Vagaries

The vagaries of the weather.  As we know, 'dry' can mean 'wet', and 'wet' can mean 'dry'.  And 'possibility of showers' can mean 1mm or 41mm.  Or 0mm.  The amateur (or professional) meteorologist gets it wrong plenty of times, but at least this week my belief that we could plan to run at Yarmouth on Friday (tomorrow) without being too fearful of firm ground looks justified.  We received plenty of rain here last night and through today (and low temperatures) and Yarmouth, approximately 70 miles east-north-east of here, looks to have had the same.  The weather site says that it still raining there now, which is in line with the forecast's projection for substantial rain in north-eastern areas of  East Anglia, and I'd say that by tomorrow afternoon we'll be more worried about the ground being too soft than too firm.

Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how our two runners go on soft ground if that is what the course ends up offering.  These two runners (Gift Of Silence and Wasabi) are both fillies for whom my principal concern would be that the ground isn't too firm, so I certainly won't be alarmed by the prospect of sending them out onto a wet track - even if there's no evidence thus far that they'll thrive on it.  But they're both in good form and they each have an in-form jockey booked (Neil Callan and Dane O'Neill respectively) so, if they do handle whatever the underfoot conditions happen to be, it'll be reasonable to hope for two good runs.  We'll see.  They're pictured here, by the way: Gift Of Silence in the field a couple of weeks ago when the weather was still nice, and then the pair of them (Carolina and Hugh up) on Side Hill AW on Saturday.

5 comments:

glenn.pennington said...

Hi John,

Would appreciate your perceptive views on the Eddie Ahern case and his ride on Judgethemoment?

Cheers

John Berry said...
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John Berry said...
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John Berry said...
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John Berry said...

I don't think that one has to be particularly perceptive to deduce that he's been incredibly foolish. His ride on Judgethemoment was very poor. It's always very hard for the stewards to work out whether a poor ride (and there are poor rides in most races) was poor deliberately or unintentionally. In this case, though, the evidence seems to suggest that it was deliberately poor. And the penalty for putting in a deliberately poor ride is high - and rightly so. Whether a 10-year disqualification for a deliberately poor ride is too high is a different issue. My view is that a 10-year race-riding ban, or even a life-time race-riding ban (either of which would be a massive, but lesser, penalty) would have been sufficient.