Haydock did their level best to get racing on but weather conditions eventually conspired against them. Don’t the hindsight smart*rses know it all?
My thoughts exactly. The most potentially significant pulses of lower temperature and snow reached the northwest some way ahead of schedule, if the Met Office forecasts from Thursday and Friday were to be believed.
Barney Clifford popped onto Timeform Radio yesterday afternoon, and pointed out that for the sake of a degree or so either way, Kirkland Tellwright had fallen lucklessly short of what would have been a fine piece of assertiveness, persistence and enterprise.
He reminded listeners that the received wisdom is covers have to come off two and a half to three hours prior to racing to give the turf time to recover from its incarceration. He found himself in exactly the same position at Mr Tellwright twice during 2009, in the face of not dissimilar forecasts, and conceded he could have faced the same public / press onslaught had there not been just enough warmth in both the ground and air temperature for the racing surface not to deteriorate in the interim.
In that regard I’m quite prepared to treat this incident as separate from some of Haydock’s other misadventures in recent times, e.g. where the racing surface on the Flat course has been described as one thing and ridden as something quite different. However, it’s precisely because of such occurrences that I wonder whether Mr Tellwright’s reputation has preceded him a little in some people’s eyes this time around? I’m not sure there would have been quite the outcry yesterday had those other mishaps not befallen him previously.
gc
Adoptive father of two. The patron saint of lower-grade fare. A gently critical friend of point-to-pointing. Kindness is a political act.