That's good

Our two runners.  Hope was very good at Chelmsford on Monday night, doing everything right at every stage of the race and finishing second behind a nice, progressive young horse, Landue, trained by Marcus Tregoning.  That was a good monkey to get off the back, having a horse finishing in the first three at Chelmsford.  We just need to have one win there now!  Hope's best two runs this season have been her two most recent ones, and she's shown that she can be as effective on the AW as on turf, so it's an easy decision to keep going for the time being.  There's a race at Wolverhampton three weeks tomorrow which ought to suit her.

That was an enjoyable trip, and being at Catterick yesterday was extremely pleasant too - apart from the time spent watching our race!  We'd been wanting cut in the ground, and the ground was listed as good to soft; but it turned out that it was far too testing for us.  I started to fear the worst when the field split in the first race and the first horse home on the far side finished ten lengths behind the winner, suggesting that conditions were extremely taxing.  Then the 12-furlong handicap was won by an eight-year-old jumper who has won over both hurdles and fences, which also suggested that this was going to be a day when seasoned-ness would be the order of the day, which would rule us out.

By the time that Das Kapital ran, I had braced myself, so it was easy enough to rationalise him finishing tailed off.  Furthermore, it was a case of deja vu.  Indira was a wonderful mare for us, hardly ever running badly.  She did run badly, though, when she ran on this card (in the 12-furlong handicap) three years ago.  In fact, she ran very badly, finishing tailed off on what was the worst run of her life.  And she loved Catterick (which itself was a going to be doubt with Das Kapital) and was in very good form at the time.  It was 'good to soft' that day too, but she couldn't cope with the very holding ground, and he couldn't yesterday either.  Still, no lives were lost.

I haven't, incidentally, passed on the opinion to the stewards that he didn't handle the ground.  I think that we've covered this in at least one previous chapter.  Firstly, it's up to the jockey: all the trainer has done is watch the race, and so has anyone else.  And, secondly and more pertinently, it would just be asking for trouble.  The ground was listed as 'good to soft' which I think would be just about Das Kapital's perfect surface.  It had also been 'good to soft' when he had run a really nice race at Pontefract the previous time.

If I had offered a report that he hadn't handled the ground, it would have been logged as him being unable to handle 'good to soft' ground, which is nonsense.  And would just confuse things, and make me look an idiot, when I go through next year trying to find good to soft ground for him.  I had this first a few years ago when a track was called 'good' because it was neither firm nor soft, but in reality was anything but good ('bad' might have been a better description) as it was a really loose (as one often sees these days).

Anyway, horse didn't run very well, and the jockey opined (and I agreed with him) that the horse had struggled on the really loose ground.  I reported to a steward that the horse hadn't handled, the ground, but he (apologetically and correctly) reported that his recording this explanation would do more harm than good as it would just go down as my saying that the horse wasn't effective on 'good' ground, which would clearly be ludicrous, not least because nearly every horse in training likes good ground.  That's why it's called good!