Today’s best bets, by Chris Cook
Hallelujah! Just in time for the core jumps season, it at last appears that most of the country is due for a proper soaking for the first time in months.
Rain forecasts can be a tricky business but, as you’d expect, they get more accurate as the weather system in question approaches so we can be pretty hopeful that the 14mm expected for the Cheltenham area tonight will actually materialise. That won’t be anything like enough to save Friday’s cross-country race, which will surely be abandoned by about this time tomorrow, but it should be enough to ensure something like normal jumping ground for mid-November around the rest of Cheltenham’s track, with three big days of action coming this weekend.
The forecast I use says there will be another dousing on Friday night, perhaps amounting to 22mm. Who knows, by Sunday there might be trainers kvetching about over-watering and bottomless ground...
At least it won’t be bottomless at Lingfield today, which will be pretty rare for a jumps fixture there. That’s a help, I think, to Cor Wot An Apple (4.05), who I sense would not want deep going for his chasing debut.
This is also his debut for Neil Mulholland, who I imagine will be pretty keen to do well with this acquisition from Colin Tizzard’s yard, since it was just the other day that one of Tizzard’s owners bought Fox Norton out of Mulholland’s place.
Anyway, Cor Wot An Apple had three quick spins in handicap hurdles in May and did enough on the first occasion to suggest he is on a winning mark if able to do just a bit better over fences for his new trainer. He sports cheekpieces for the first time.
Mulholland is up to 50 winners for the season already and has been scoring at a 21% strike-rate since the end of April. His five-year-old is a very fair 15-2 here.
I’m going to be taking a keen interest in anything Ben Pauling runs over the coming weeks, bearing in mind the pattern he established through the last two winters of peaking in November, December and January. Not for him the low-hanging fruit of early autumn, when your horses will probably avoid rivals from the biggest yards!
Pauling went 0/19 in October for the last three years combined, so I take it as a positive sign that he actually managed to win a race last month. He is already two from three now that we’ve turned over a page in the calendar and has some interesting runners today.
Chief among these is Paddy’s Field (1.35), an 11-2 shot for a novice handicap chase at Sedgefield. His reputation rather exceeded his accomplishments over hurdles but the consequence is that he starts off a workable mark in this sphere and the best of him should be to come.
