This week's Saturday Nap runs on Friday, all being well. So if you tune in on Friday night or Saturday morning to find we've already won, apologies for that but it could be that you were lucky to miss out on another big, brash, confident disappointment.
I've been waiting for sometime for Penglai Pavilion (Cheltenham, Friday, 2.10) to turn up in a proper race and realized last week that it would most likely be at the first Cheltenham meeting of the season. I think he's the best of John Ferguson's classy recruits from the flat and so it figures that he would be aimed at the most prestigious early season novice hurdle. Here, rather than mopping up easy pickings in the provinces in summer, there will be opposition from the big gun stables. There's no saying what price he might be until we see which of the declarations have stood their ground but, whatever the start list looks like, I'll back him blind.
The next best, probably, of the stable's young potential stars, Maputo, took on a field that included a few useful looking types at Kempton last Sunday and recorded his fourth win and so I'm expecting Penglai to win as well. The only slight doubts are look what happened to Emotionless after my bravura recommendation two weeks ago, and then 2m5f. Really? Okay, then. But he did leave everything else behind in a different postcode on his previous two runs.
So, I'll also be interested in Qewy's first run over fences in the second on Friday and it looks like Courtown Oscar is set to make it a hat-trick at Carlisle tomorrow.
It is no fun at all if you don't believe in anything.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I publish booklets of my own poems, or did. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become. It keeps me out of more trouble than it gets me into. I hope you find at least some of it worthwhile.
