The Betway ambassador discusses his ride on Fun Fun Fun at Exeter on Friday before looking ahead to Sunday's action in Ireland.
Although the race didn’t quite go to plan for our mare, it was nice to make the trip over to Exeter for the first time on Friday to ride Fun Fun Fun. In truth, I was never really happy with how she was travelling, and she just seemed to be finding everything hard work, so it’ll be back to the drawing board with her now I’d say.
I’m heading over to Naas on Sunday for five rides, so hopefully we’ll have a bit more luck there, and a few winners across the afternoon certainly wouldn’t hurt.
I start off with Dschingis Desire in the maiden hurdle (14:00), and she’d be wanting to bounce back now after a really disappointing showing at Leopardstown over Christmas on her first start for us. She stopped very quickly that day, so I’m hoping she’s much better than what she showed that day, but I would expect her to step forward with that outing under her belt. In fairness, we were quite handy in that race at Leopardstown, and we all stopped quite quickly up front, so maybe we just went a bit hard that day.
We then have Majolique making her first start for us in the Juvenile race (14:30). We haven’t got a whole lot of work into her at home, to be honest, but she’s shown us a bit of ability in the work that she has done, so I’m sure she’ll be able to win races. We’ll have to wait and see whether she’s up to winning this on her first start over hurdles, as it’s no easy task coming into a race like this, taking on juveniles with plenty of experience. Having said that, she’s won a race around Longchamp, so she has that experience under her belt, and you’d imagine they’re all competitive races around there. We’re not 100% sure what to expect from her here, so I’d say we’ll know more about her after this.
Joueur Masque goes in the third race (15:00), and he’s been very disappointing so far this season for us. We were hoping he could really kick on after getting off the mark in a maiden hurdle at Punchestown in the summer, but his two runs since then have been well below that level. That win at Punchestown was on good to yielding ground, so it might be we’ll see better from him in the spring on a bit better ground, but he really does need to leave his recent efforts behind if he’s going to be winning this on Sunday.
Another horse on a bit of a retrieval mission is Blood Destiny, who runs in the Grade 3 feature race (16:30). I took a chance on him in that competitive handicap at Fairyhouse in January, and I could just never get competitive on him. He hasn’t been himself in his last couple of races at all, so he just needs to show us a bit more, but I suppose you could say the same about Captain Guinness who isn’t getting any younger, and Touch Me Not has been around plenty. They are all pretty exposed, so I’d say it’s just a case of who arrives there on Sunday on a going day.
There’s then a competitive novices’ handicap chase to conclude the card (17:00), and I’m looking forward to riding Magic McColgan in this. She seems to have taken to chasing relatively well, and she ran a respectable race at Naas last time behind The Great Nudie of Colin Bowe’s. I think she’ll appreciate this first start in handicap company, and a mark of 118 looks fair based on what she’s achieved so far, so I’m hoping she can give a good account of herself here in a race where I’m sure plenty of them will fancy their chances.
