Festival ground should be ideal

Leopardstown Christmas Festival: Almost perfect ground conditions for the eagerly-awaited four-day Christmas festival are being predicted by the Leopardstown authorities.

Connections of horses hoping for the usual mid-winter testing surface look likely to be disappointed with the going at Leopardstown yesterday reported to be "yielding."

A dry week ahead could see the ground quicken up even more and the Leopardstown racing manager Tom Burke admitted yesterday: "The ground here is as good as has been seen in a long, long time at this time of year."

Burke added: "At the moment it's yielding with some yielding to soft places and I think it might improve a bit more again by the weekend.

"The forecast is reasonably good. There is a possibility of a bit of rain for Wednesday but apart from that we are hearing that we should be largely dry up to Sunday anyway. After that it is still a bit far ahead to be accurate."

The St Stephen's Day fixture is one of the most important of the year for Leopardstown and a crowd of up to 17,000 is expected this time.

"The first two days are usually in the region of 16,000 to 17,000 and the last day is expected to be 10,000-plus.

"The third day is a hard call because that is the day that Best Mate ran here for the previous two years.

"Sadly there is no Best Mate factor this year," Burke said.

Beef Or Salmon beat Best Mate into second place in last year's Lexus Chase and will bid for a third overall win in the race for his trainer Michael Hourigan.