It was like “looking at a Premier League squad” as the entries arrived on Monday for the Charlie Hall Chase on saturday, according to Jonjo Sanderson, Wetherby’s clerk of the course.
“I’d been given a slight nod that Cyrname [the top-rated chaser in training] was coming, which was a huge tonic for us,” Sanderson said on Tuesday, “but they just kept coming as we went through the morning. We got to about 15 and it was stuck for ages, then the next time I looked, it was up to 20 and we had Might Bite [the 2018 Gold Cup runner-up] and La Bague Au Roi [dual Grade One winner] in there, and quite a few others.
“We’re living in strange times and there’s reasons why some of those horses can’t go to Northern Ireland on Saturday [for a valuable meeting at Down Royal], so we’re the lucky beneficiaries. I’m sure the weather and the condition of the course is playing its part as well and it’s slightly ironic that in a year when we’ve had to trim the prize money a little we’ve probably got the best field I’ve seen for the Charlie Hall in my 12 or 13 years at Wetherby.”
There has not been a double-figure field for the Charlie Hall since 2006, when Our Vic beat nine rivals, but there is every chance that there will be at least as many lining up this time.
“We had about 5mm of rain yesterday that wasn’t particularly forecast and we should get about the same today, which is forecast,” Sanderson said. “But it’s not going to cause any major issues. We started the season on good-to-soft and it may have dried marginally [since], but if we get what’s forecast we’ll be around good-to-soft, soft by Friday and Saturday, so all being well it will be the nice, early-season jumping ground that we’ve been craving for years.”
Wetherby has staged one meeting since racing was suspended in mid-March and while the racing on Friday and Saturday, when the supporting card also includes the Grade Two West Yorkshire Hurdle, should do its part to keep off-course betting turnover rolling, the track will miss out on gate and hospitality revenue from its most high-profile fixture of the year.
“Friday is pretty successful in its own right, but this meeting and Christmas, those four days alone, are a pretty significant contribution to our annual revenue,” Sanderson said. “I think we get around 40% of our crowd over those days, so it’s a bit of a bind to be brutally honest. But we’re not alone, we just have to knuckle down and play the cards we’re dealt.
Quick Guide
Chris Cook’s Tuesday tips
Bangor 12.30 Forget You Not 1.00 Fair And Dandy 1.30 Arcade Attraction 2.00 Winningseverything 2.35 Minella Drama 3.05 Frisco Bay 3.40 Mint Condition 4.15 Neo
Catterick 12.40 Glinbury 1.10 Highjacked 1.40 Rich Belief (nb) 2.10 Grace And Virtue 2.45 Main Fact 3.15 Redrosezorro 3.50 Rhubarb 4.25 Carlovian
Chepstow 12.50 Time To Tinker 1.20 Balmuick 1.50 Hideaway Vic (nap) 2.20 Galileo Silver 2.55 Molliana 3.25 Liosduin Bhearna 4.00 The Darley Lama 4.35 Stage Star
Southwell 4.50 Global Hope 5.20 Seaclusion 5.50 Notation 6.20 Xcelente 6.50 Russian Rumour 7.20 Mountain Dreams 7.50 Artistic Streak
“We lost the last six fixtures of last season so by the spring we’ll probably have gone through 24 fixtures without crowds. But we budgeted for no crowds for the whole season so we have a reasonably good outlook on what we are dealing with this season and the Levy Board’s funding is a huge assistance for us in terms of our prize money commitment. So long as we can all keep the Levy Board going, it will be a huge support for British racing.”
Tuesday’s best bets, by Chris Cook
A handful of chasing debutants may prove to be nicely handicapped today, most notably Hideaway Vic (1.50), a 4-1 shot at Chepstow. He fared respectably in a handful of hurdles starts, but is bred to be better at this and comes from the Anthony Honeyball yard that has managed two winners from six recent runners.
A failure to settle on heavy going cost him at Plumpton in January, his only handicap outing. He was a warm order that day and was attracting some support on Monday night.
At Bangor, they’re staging two divisions of a novice handicap chase, with Forget You Not (12.30) and Fair And Dandy (1.00) looking like they could leave their previous form behind in this sphere, at double-figure odds. But Mint Condition (3.40) is the most interesting runner on the card, moving into handicaps after showing promise in novice hurdles last term, representing an in-form, low-profile yard. He’s being overlooked at 9-1.