I thought that the UK weather had thrown every conceivable spanner in the works this past year aside from deep snow, I'd forgotten about "fog". Those of us of a certain age, and certainly those brought up in Industrial Conurbations before "smokeless zones" will have seen far worse but for the Gen Z's who now flood social media slagging off ITV because they couldn't see the horses in the fog, it will have come as a real shock!

 

From what we could see we had some minor places and enhanced places at Chepstow and an unfortunate non-runner and at Wetherby with relatively excellent visibility a couple of decent placed runs. The most frustrating aspect though will be trying to correlate the form of races that in reality we cannot really judge going forwards.

 

On to today and smallish fields at Newbury and Leicester and a similar Card at Catterick where we did look long and hard at the 3 mile Chase at 2.45 before deciding it was just too tricky in terms of horses and market value. 

 

That leaves us with Leopardstown and Limerick and some cracking handicaps, it's totally fair to say that Sean and michael haven't been finding winners as easily as they did last winter, there are i think mitigating circumstances for that and plenty of placed runners coming but we know of old that either of them just wants a big priced one to drop, and they can then go on something of a "winner frenzy"....

 

Sean will take in 2 Handicap Hurdles at Leopardstown with some very specific staking advice and Michael will also take in a couple of Handicap Hurdles at Limerick.