Jono O’Neill’s two potential Gold Cup contenders could take each other on in the Betfair Chase at Haydock this month, both having run with credit in defeat over the weekend. Taquin Du Seuil has been committed to the race by his trainer while Holywell is also a possibility for the race.
“I was happy enough with him,” O’Neill said on Monday of Taquin Du Seuil, who ran on dourly to be second behind Menorah in Wetherby’s Charlie Hall Chase. “He could have done with softer ground but at least we found out that he stays.”
Asked how the horse had recovered from the outing, O’Neill said he was “spot on, which is a relief because I was a bit nervous about that ground. He’ll go to the Haydock race now.”
Holywell, in contrast, “might have found the ground a bit too soft” when he was a distant third at Carlisle on Sunday, a virtual repeat of his seasonal reappearance from last year. “I was delighted with him, to be fair. Over two and a half miles, that ground was a bit hard on him. We know he’s a lot better in the spring.
“We’ll have to wait and see what we do with him now. There’s a conditions race at Aintree but we might have to put him in the Betfair as well.” Like almost any other trainer with two such classy animals, O’Neill would rather keep them apart and sustain at least the possibility of two wins rather than embracing the certainty of at least one defeat. “But there’s only so many races for these horses.”
O’Neill is widely seen as a live runner in the trainers’ title race this jumps season and is no bigger than 5-1 to prevail, partly thanks to the presence in his yard of those two Gold Cup hopes, both winners at the last Festival. But when the trainer is asked if he could see himself taking the title this winter, he replies: “Not really, not at all.
“After Cheltenham [in March], if we’re still there with a chance, that’s another story. But as anybody can see, we don’t have the firepower of Paul Nicholls or Nicky Henderson. We’d need the other lads [other trainers] to do a lot of winning, that’s the only way you might end up with a squeak.”
O’Neill’s main yard at his base near Cheltenham can house 120 horses but is currently home to “about 110”. “So we’ve a few spare boxes and we’re open to offers. We’ve a lot of nice three-year-olds in, that probably won’t even run this winter. We’ve 20 or more of those.”
It seems surprising that a trainer of O’Neill’s ability should have empty boxes after successes in the Gold Cup, the Grand National and many other major races in the past five years. Edward Gillespie, a longserving MD at Cheltenham racecourse until 2012, has been helping the yard in a promotional role and has brought new owners to a stable still dominated by dozens of JP McManus’s horses. “He’s been letting everybody know that it’s not a closed shop,” O’Neill says.
“That seems to be the way that people see it. Slowly, slowly we’re getting there, I think, but Rome wasn’t built in a day.”
O’Neill is one of the more reliably cheerful characters in racing, able to take a philosophical view of any setback, and he plays down the personal importance of his title challenge. “It’s not going to make a difference to my life, one way or another. I’d love to have won the National as a jockey but I never even got round the thing. You’ve got to learn to accept these things. You’d love to have it on your CV, to have been champion jockey and champion trainer.”
As he discusses some of his horses, the likes of Merry King, Burton Port and Shutthefrontdoor, it becomes clear that O’Neill could turn up at Aintree in April with a particularly strong hand. “Well that would make life easier, now,” he says with a laugh. “If I had the first, second and third in the National, I’d have a fair chance of the title then.”
