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Showing posts from August, 2010

Yorkshire Oaks

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York’s Ebor meeting, held last week, is one of the highlights of my flat racing season. As an unreconstructed professional Yorkshireman, I have a predictable affinity with this sublime, stylish and mature track that some refer to as the Ascot of the north (if comparisons must be made then surely it is that Ascot is the York of the south?) (And Guildford is the Wakefield of Surrey….).  This year’s Yorkshire Oaks was a classic encounter of the nation’s top middle distance fillies. A favourite of mine, last year’s dual Oaks winner, Sariska was lining up against old foe and globe-trotting multi-grade 1 winner Midday, as well as the star of this season’s classic filly crop Snow Fairy. Sariska was the star filly last year. Beautiful, graceful…..profitable.  She probably counts as one of my few genuine and unmitigated successes on the flat. She came to my attention during a listed event at Newbury where she broke poorly, slowly and late, but made up acres of ground to finish like a classic m

In praise of Sea The Stars

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Outside football I’ve had a pretty profitable Summer’s punting. (Cue lightning flashes and opening of gaping holes in the ground). But as a spectacle, the racing has not matched the nose-bleeding heights attained by the great Sea The Stars last year. But I firmly believe that was a once in a generation event. My pro-punting mate and Cheltenham accomplice Steve sent me a bit of heart-felt prose from a pretty hard-nosed gambling aquaintance of his. It’s lovely stuff: “ Awful game this...
We get pissed off with how it's run. We get pissed off with those who run it. We get pissed off with clerks who can’t run a tap (or run it too much!). We chunter about bent races and question bad rides. It costs us an arm & a leg to go see it happen and when we get there it's crawling with drunks, way too packed and the traffic was sickening enough for you to swear you're never going again.....
You wonder why you bother?
 In my case, I 'bother' because it's all the family ha

Moribund no more

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So that statistic about 95% of blogs being abandoned within months of their creation is true. I see my last posting was way back in March 2008. Just another unloved and uncared for blog in a desert of social networking casualties. So much for it being a vehicle for witty and regular missives on the twists and turns of a shambolic mug punting career! But no! Lazarus-like, this blog can be resurrected. I will truly aspire to lofty commitments of irregular, variable quality and dubiously sourced postings. Let it be so! In a World Cup summer, it's no surprise that football punting has dominated my activities. But, sadly, only marginally profitably. As a football spectacle most commentators agree that the quality of the action at this tournament was low. My take on this is that it continues a recent trend that declined sharply four years ago in Germany. Whilst South Africa saw (arguably) less blatant diving, air-card waving and general referee pressurising, there was a desperate r