Sandown Park will not stage the hoped-for head-to-head between Sprinter Sacre and Sire De Grugy on Saturday, but the absence of the last two winners of the Queen Mother Champion Chase from the field for the Tingle Creek Chase could result instead in the biggest field for the Grade One contest for many years. A total of 18 entries were received on Monday for a race which has been re-opened several times due to lack of entries since it was elevated to Grade One status in 1994.
The online betting firm 888sport, which will sponsor the Tingle Creek for the first time this year, installed Alan King’s six-year-old Balder Succes as their 7-2 favourite on Monday afternoon. Balder Succes took the Grade One Maghull Novice Chase at Aintree in April, and is currently the third-favourite for the Queen Mother Champion Chase behind Sprinter Sacre and Sire De Grugy, who took the Tingle Creek on the way to victory in Cheltenham’s two-mile chasing championship in 2012 and 2013 respectively.
Balder Succes went on from Aintree to finish third behind God’s Own, a 25-1 outsider, in a Grade One novice chase over the Tingle Creek’s two-mile trip at Punchestown in May.
That line of form may prompt some interest in God’s Own, who has since won the Haldon Gold Cup at Exeter, for Saturday’s race at a top price of 9-2, while Nicky Henderson’s Oscar Whisky, who will deputise for his stablemate Sprinter Sacre, is a 10-1 chance to lift his yard’s spirits with a Grade One success after an unusually slow start to the winter campaign.
“God’s Own is a horse we hold in high regard and everything seems to be right for him,” Paddy Brennan, who will ride God’s Own for trainer Tom George, said on Monday.
“We are just hoping for a dry week. The better the ground, the better his chance. He’s tough, he’s brave and I’m really hoping he can step up to Grade One level.”
Willie Mullins, Ireland’s champion trainer, has three entries in the race including Twinlight, a Grade One novice chase winner at Leopardstown last season, while Thomas Mullins could run Alderwood, the winner of the two-mile Grand Annual Chase at Cheltenham’s Festival meeting in 2013. Paul Nicholls, who won the Tingle Creek eight times in 12 years between 1999 and 2010, has two possible runners, Dodging Bullets and Hinterland.
“I certainly can’t recall 18 entries before, in fact it rarely gets to double figures,” Andrew Cooper, Sandown’s clerk of the course, said on Monday. “Numerically it’s very strong, and perhaps it’s a silver lining of not having the last two winners and those big names. I’m sure it’s going to be quite an open betting market, more like the days when it was a limited handicap with a lot of nice horses at double-figure odds with a decent chance.”
The ground at Newbury for last Saturday’s Hennessy Gold Cup was testing, but the test of speed around Sandown, which is always one of the highlights of December’s racing programme, seems likely to be staged on better ground.
“We’d have been wet and soft here last weekend too,” Cooper said. “It stopped raining on Thursday after we’d had rain for most of November, but we’ve had a dry few days since then and there’s little in the way of appreciable rain in the forecast at all. There might be a little drizzle on any given day, but no more than 1mm if that.
“The ground on the chase track is soft at the moment, from soft and heavy in places, and the vast majority of it is soft. I suspect the first word will still be soft at the end of the week, but it might also be good-to-soft in places.”
The 100-1 outsider for the Tingle Creek in early betting is Nigel Twiston-Davies’s Mad Moose, who was banned from racing indefinitely in January having been reluctant to start in last year’s renewal, his seventh refusal or near-refusal in the space of just 14 months. The banning order on the 10-year-old was lifted last month.
