11/10 seemed like scant reward for relentlessly pursuing the Hilly Way chase with Felix Yonger in it but eventually, the race went ahead and that nap was landed.
It would have been the nap, at 5/2, two weeks ago but Cork was flooded. The meeting was rescheduled for last Sunday, when I took 2/1 ante post, but the track was still unraceable. So the meeting was moved to Navan on Monday, where he was chalked up at 6/4 so I took that. And the SP was 11/10. Don't talk to me about the law of diminishing returns.
I am feeling a little bit smartarse about the Houdini act I've performed over the last couple of weeks, refusing to put more money into my account but plotting my way out of the downward slide rather than join the ranks of destitute losers who insist on ploughing in more good money after bad. It is for good reason that the specialist racing channels used to have so many loan companies advertising on them, to their niche market.
The other side of that story is, of course, how my litany of recent winners would have been worth much more had I weighed in on them but, what's the point, it's not really about the money. 2015 will have shown a respectable profit and there will be something to start next year with. It could have been worse.
There's an end-of-term atmosphere now because this might be the last post, as it were, for this year.
Yanworth has been backed as if defeat is out of the question for Friday's Supreme Trial but I can't quite see it being any value with Altior in opposition and the 6/1 Penglai Pavilion could conceivably look like a seasonal gift if his last run is put behind him and he lives up to the hype that preceded it, some of which was provided by me.
I similarly don't want to nominate Saphir du Rheu for the Long Walk Hurdle with Thistlecrack still on the upgrade and Reve de Sivola always dangerous on heavy ground.
The Saturday Nap has been a moveable feast this year, not running on Saturday very often. It has run on Fridays, Sundays, Mondays. And now it runs on Thursday, the main problem being that I've stumbled across a winner for a few days in a row by now and so I'm going to back a loser soon. But Jessbers Dream in the first at Exeter tomorrow has been backed to 4/5 and looks very solid, without being bombproof, and so is a confident selection to sweep us into the black and ready for Boxing Day.
I was going to tip Don Cossack, here and now, for the King George, which is the right place to end on a winning note and the price is contracting all the time, but you have to worry about Cue Card; I'd love to see Silviniaco Conti do it one more time; there are plenty of other opportunities over Christmas, one of which might not be the offer of taking 4/1 about The New One to beat Faugheen.
And so this won't be the last Saturday Nap of this year's adventure. It will be a cliff-hanging ending worthy of that great English novelist, Dick Francis.
David Green
- David Green (Books) is the imprint under which I published booklets of my own poems. The original allocation of ISBN numbers is used up now, though. The 'Collected Poems' are now available as a pdf. The website is now what it has become, often more about music than books and not so often about poems. It will be about whatever suggests itself.
