Ignore This Advice...

This week you’ll be expecting me to give you a few winners for Cartmel Races over the weekend. I hate to disappoint you, but I’m going to give you some of my normal selections instead and hope for the best. Anyone who has been reading this blog for a while will know to treat the information with caution!

The first thing to do, if you’re studying form and are pushed for time, is to check through the list of trainers with runners. For example, Nigel Twiston-Davies has a strike rate of 24% at Cartmel over the last four years – a great thing to drop into the conversation over the weekend if you want to sound knowledgeable in front of your friends. If he has four runners on the card, there’s a reasonable chance of one winner.

The same goes for Donald McCain, who has a 27% strike rate. The problem is (there’s always a snag) if you’d placed £1 on all their horses in the last four years at Cartmel, you’d have backed lots of winners but lost £7.87 in the process. Better instead to back all of Dianne Sayer’s runners. Dianne has a strike rate of one winner in five runners at Cartmel and they’re good prices too - £1 on all of her runners would have yielded a profit of £14.25. Possible runners over the weekend include Auberge and Red Kingdom, both of who are previous course winners.

The King of Cartmel though, in percentage terms, is Jonjo O’Neil. He may have only sent six runners here in the last four years, but three of them have been winners and he’s showing a profit of £9 to a £1 stake. Temple Lord is entered on Bank Holiday Monday and could even have the assistance of Champion Jockey Tony McCoy in the saddle. He’d be my nap of the meeting.

It’s well worth looking at some of the trainers who make infrequent visits to the track. For example, Philip Hobbs may have his first runner since 2009 with Triggerman, who finished third in last season’s Welsh Grand National. He is one horse among a high quality field entered for the Burlington Stone Grand Veterans Chase, but he would be a very popular winner.

John Ferguson hasn’t brought a runner to Cartmel in four years and has decided to enter two lovely novice hurdlers, one on Saturday evening and one on Monday. While Halifax will be interesting to note in the betting market, I like Allowed who finished third to Irish Saint at Kempton’s big Christmas meeting and therefore has form comparable with the very best juvenile hurdlers of last season.

Of course I wouldn’t blame you for ignoring my advice and simply backing the horses with the most appropriate names. How about Jive Master on the North West Evening Mail Vintage Race-night?