Naas officials are keeping everything crossed that the weather won’t prove a spoilsport once again in advance of Friday’s rescheduled Grade One programme.
It’s a case of ‘as you were’ for the first top-flight race of 2024, the Lawlor’s of Naas Novice Hurdle, after eight horses declared for Sunday’s cancelled contest were left in again at Monday’s fresh acceptance stage.
A total of 10 entries, half of them from Willie Mullins, remain in the mix for the €100,000 highlight. There will be free admission for Friday’s fixture.
Sunday’s meeting was cancelled after just one race due to fog although it’s another F word – frost – that could give cause for concern later this week.
Sub-zero overnight temperatures are forecast throughout the week, although daytime temperatures could reach 7 degrees.
“Fingers crossed, toes, everything we have!” joked the Naas manager Eamonn McEvoy on Monday, although he added the weather outlook will be much more clear by Wednesday’s final declaration stage.
“It’s changing all the time. It’s just the time of year. It would be a sickener to lose it, but hopefully we’ll be okay,” he said.
Advice from Met Éireann prompted the decision to switch to Friday rather than earlier in the week, with hopes of a pickup in temperatures through Thursday and Friday. However, Sunday’s cancellation underlined just how unpredictable weather conditions can be at this time of year.
“I was gutted. At 11am, I just clapped my hands together, great, we’re good to go, and then it [fog] just got so thick: 500 metres to the left and 500 metres to the right it was blue skies. It was just bizarre,” McEvoy said.
Connections of the major players for the big race, including the Mullins-trained Ile Atlantique and Gordon Elliott’s Firefox, have indicated their readiness to line up for the rescheduled fixture.
Mullins has won the race five times in the last decade, with Elliott successful on four occasions and Bob Olinger scoring for Henry de Bromhead in 2021.
The Mullins team is a less familiar force at Wetherby, although the Yorkshire track is set to host the impressive Paddy Power Chase winner Meetingofthewaters in a Grade Two on Saturday.
Meetingofthewaters is one of 10 entries left in the William Hill Towton Novices’ Chase where he will once again carry the colours of owner, Paul Byrne.
Noble Yeats carried those same silks when runner-up to Ahoy Senor in the 2022 Towton before being sold and winning the Aintree Grand National.
Mullins has also kept open the option of running Janidil in Saturday’s Grade Two Silviniaco Conti Chase at Kempton, a race also on the radar of Joseph O’Brien’s top-flight Aintree winner, Banbridge.
Malina Girl is in the mix to try to continue Gavin Cromwell’s run of cross-channel success in Warwick’s marathon Wigley Classic Chase. She could be joined by Ted Walsh’s veteran star Any Second Now in what will be a first visit to the track by the Co Kildare trainer.
“I’ve never had a runner at Warwick, I’ve never been to Warwick, but it’s a race I’ve often watched. It suits the National-type of horse, it’s a lot of jumping and you really have to stay there, which I think will suit him,” Walsh reported on Monday.
“I’m very limited in what I can do here [in Ireland]. He’s not good enough for the better races and I ran him at Navan off 150, but a lot of the races here are confined at 150 – he’s now 148.
“If I don’t go there, I’ll go to the Thyestes, but the Thyestes is very, very heavy ground and it’s competitive. Warwick is definitely on the agenda to go there.
“He’s now 12 years of age – he’s a pensioner. I haven’t any aspiration of him being a live contender for the National any more, but I think he’s quite capable of winning a race somewhere,” he added.
Any Second Now finished runner-up in the 2022 Aintree Grand National and was third the year before. He is a 33-1 shot with some firms for Aintree in April.
In other news, the Irish Horseracing Regulatory Board (IHRB) has confirmed a referrals panel hearing will take place into an incident involving trainer Thomond O’Mara at Cork in November.
The move comes after a senior IHRB official examined an altercation between Co Tipperary based O’Mara and Cork’s clerk of the course Paul Moloney.
The latter told race-day stewards he was approached by O’Mara as he was coming off the track after a race and that the trainer became “increasingly abusive and aggressive towards him, which resulted in Mr O’Mara becoming physical”.
No date has been set for the hearing, nor for appeals to be heard in relation to matters involving trainers Luke Comer and Tony Martin.
Comer is appealing a three-year licence suspension, along with fines and legal costs of over €830,000, imposed in September after a dozen of the billionaire businessman’s string tested positive for anabolic steroids.
The IHRB is appealing the leniency of that penalty and also in relation to Martin’s six-month licence suspension, suspended by two years, after his Dundalk winner, Firstman, failed a drugs test a year ago. Martin for his part is also appealing the penalties imposed on him.
“The process to schedule the hearings in relation to Mr Martin, Mr Comer and Mr O’Mara is under way,” an IHRB spokesman said on Monday.
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