General / Jeremy Grayson / 08 February 2009 / Leave a comment

In between risking life and limb just stepping out of his house, Jeremy Grayson evaluates the merits of proposed plans to the end of the National Hunt season.

The nation is freezing. The road network is more slippery than Lord Mandelson marinaded in Swarfega, and I can't walk to the foot of my garden without performing the most uncoordinated lurches on ice this side of Todd Carty. Like many of you, I imagine, I have frequently turned my head to the skies this week and screamed, "The salt! Where's all the bleedin' salt gone?"

I have since cultivated a theory, though. The British salt shortage (I'd call it "Saltgate", but speed-reading Chesterfield FC fans would get unnecessarily giddy), has not been caused by bad planning at local authority level, but rather by the thousands of pinches of the stuff we've all had to take when reading certain media outlets' horseracing editorial pieces over the years.

I must have heaved my way through a whole factory of Saxo when reading Liz Jones' piece on the Grand National in the Mail last Spring, for example - quite the most bewildering, inaccurate attack on the sport that I've ever read in a daily.

As such, the "news" of the proposed changes to the end of the National Hunt season widely reported last week shouldn't be regarded as gospel just yet; though if plans really are afoot to move the jump elements of Sandown's Bet365 Gold Cup meeting in late April to Cheltenham, I don't see that as being the magic fix that is going to bring the season to the thundering climax that so many in the sport crave.

If we take this year's racedays at Cheltenham and Sandown as an example, and then condense all the Bet365 meetings' jump races into one day, we're left with an itinerary that reads;

April 2009
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Wed 15th, Thurs 16th, Friday 17th (evening) - Cheltenham
Sat 25th - Bet365 Day at Sandown or Cheltenham, tbc

May 2009
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Weds 6th (evening) - Cheltenham

I can't think of the last time Cheltenham ever maintained such a congested programme of fixtures. If the ground hasn't recovered enough from the three-day meeting (and it has just 7 ½ days to do so), then the move will have been been self-defeating if field sizes consequently cut up on Bet365 day (to say nothing of how it will ride for the hunter chase evening in early May).

Here's an alternative suggestion that might have legs. One essay in Timeform Chasers and Hurdlers 2005-2006 proposed the hosting of a top-class final meeting at the end of May instead. Among other benefits, this would enable the likes of the Swinton Hurdle and Punchestown Festival just before it to count as part of the current season, rather than (as now) remain disembodied highlights of the next.

The author(s) threw down the gauntlet to Ascot to put words into action where its oft-repeated desire to increase its jumps profile is concerned, and to propose itself as the venue for any such end-of-term highlight. After all, unlike Sandown, the hurdles and chase courses at the Berkshire venue are entirely separate from the Flat one, so could facilitate an extension of the jumps programme without detriment to the summer code's racing surface.

Whichever the venue, there are issues to address with Timeform's proposal - the cost of another extra few weeks' worth of course husbandry (and watering if necessary), persuading high-profile sponsors that their £100,000+ Graded contests won't cut up to four-runner affairs due to lack of support from trainers, and so on.

But those issues strike me as well worth overcoming if it means no further diminution of the London area's embattled National Hunt racing assets, a slide which started with the closure of Hurst Park (the original home of races such as the Triumph Hurdle, remember) in 1962 and continued with Windsor going all-Flat in the mid-1990s.

The bottom line is this; love Cheltenham as I do, I still reckon that to let the National Hunt season finale leave the capital would constitute a bigger slip up than the purler I've just taken trying to bring the milk in. Grrr, now where's all the bleedin' salt gone?