CHELTENHAM DAY 4 - GOLD CUP DAY
By the skin of our teeth… and with one bound we were almost free!
The more flamboyant Tipster type might tell you that we have had two winning days from three so far. That we have - across the various Posts, Ratings and Stats pieces - had multiple double-digit winners! Roll up, roll up! The reality, of course, is that Day 2 was a total train crash, and thanks to young Joseph O’Brien and Home By The Lee at 33/1, Thursday wasn’t. The scores on the doors are +6.8, -32.5, and +19.8, so all in all, we’re almost 6 points down. I was quite pleased, smug even, until I texted a chum in his box and asked if he had read my advice. No, he said. “But it’s OK… My wife plays tennis with one of the Martator owners, so she and I had that at 66, and then had backed White Noise in the first.”
Squashed doesn’t really cut it sometimes.
Lambourn lunches today with vets, models, trainers, itinerant bounders, plus Madame, with me slotting neatly into the background. Then dinner… then another dinner… then Sunday lunch for a dozen. It’s getting to the stage where the Galway Festival would actually be a quieter alternative!
It’s about this time of year that I feel I need a break… just tell me when it’s safe to go out on the old banana boat during my extraordinarily cheap All-Inclusive on the Shatt-al-Arab.
Meanwhile, Willie has been a bit tetchy about God and Cheltenham not providing a mud bath; am I alone in thinking it hasn’t all been four-leaf clover and craic between our two great nations this week? Argy-bargies down at the start; a punch up in the Ladies’ Loo today behind the Guinness Village, (the video HERE is a cracker - and the answer is “Yes, your Bum does look too big in that!) There was another barney in the betting shop on Tuesday with an all-round melee. What’s going on?
Winners today… I feel as though my luck is in, and that even I could survive the Cheltenham Car Park on a wet Friday afternoon, three false starts, a visit to an on-course betting shop and bar, and possibly even a flirt with a girl called Doreen who is wearing enough material to cover a smartphone.
