Coneygree will have a racecourse gallop at Haydock on Wednesday morning, with anxious connections hoping to be satisfied he is fit enough to take his chance in the Betfair Chase a week on Saturday.
Last year’s Cheltenham Gold Cup winner has been off the track for exactly a year, having sustained a hock injury, but is said to be entirely sound and healthy again and ready to risk his unbeaten record over fences at some stage in the coming weeks.
“He’s in very good nick,” said Sara Bradstock, one half of the husband and wife team who train Coneygree. “We’re going up to Haydock because they’ve got the ground [with some give] and there’s no harm in showing him the place. So I shall drive up very early in the morning to avoid the traffic and he’ll have a good old gallop.”
The unusually dry autumn has meant Coneygree’s serious work has been confined to an all-weather surface. “I just want to get him on the grass,” Bradstock said. “He’s done plenty on the all-weather but, particularly when they’ve been off for some time with an injury, you feel like you need to get them used to the grass again. He’s been cantering on grass and he’s hacked on it but he hasn’t been galloping.
“If we’re going to get the rain now, I’d have liked another week to work him on our grass gallops at home. But when you get to where he is, there aren’t too many options. It’s either Haydock or the Hennessy off top weight.
“You can argue it both ways and the Hennessy would give us another week but, for his first run after being off for that long, it will be a cavalry charge under top weight. The Betfair will be a smaller field and it looks like the civilised option.”
Bradstock has an inventive plan for Coneygree’s gallop on Merseyside on Wednesday. The nine-year-old will work with an unnamed stablemate and, once he has pulled ahead of that one, his half-brother Carruthers will join in for the final three furlongs of the work. The much-loved Carruthers, winner of the Hennessy five years ago, is 13 and being prepared for another winter as a point-to-pointer.
“Coneygree’s not a flashy work horse at home,” Bradstock said, “but I’m rather hoping he’ll be inspired by a racecourse. And I don’t want to murder one of my others by asking them to keep up with him. So we’ll cheat by letting Carruthers join in late, which will make him feel he’s still very fast.” Nico de Boinville, who has become Coneygree’s regular rider, will be aboard the Gold Cup winner.
“We’ll know a lot more after this,” Bradstock added. “And yes, there’s a possibility that he’s more lacking in fitness than we have thought. In which case we may have to change our plans.”
Coneygree is 3-1 second-favourite for the Betfair and is also second in the betting for March’s Gold Cup, for which he is available at 10-1.
While the recent weather has been dry for much of the country, Haydock has taken enough water to make the going “on the easy side of good” according to its clerk of the course, Kirkland Tellwright, who has not had to resort to irrigation before the Betfair Chase meeting and does not expect to. “We’ll have rain this evening, rain tomorrow and more on Saturday and Monday,” he said.
“That’ll do us fine. If we get all that, we’ll be somewhere between good to soft and soft for the Betfair Chase, as we normally would for that fixture.”
Tellwright has had to do very little watering on any part of his circuit this year, thanks to “a wettish summer”. “For the first time in my career as a clerk, I didn’t water once this year to ease the going in advance of a Flat fixture,” he said. “It is without precedent. I did sometimes water after racing in order to promote grass growth, but that’s all.”
