Sea Fisher to strike

Tramore has long been associated with a four-day August festival that embraced the church holiday on the 15th, but next year it will achieve a new status.

As arrangements stand, it will be the only meeting on New Year's Day in England or Ireland.

This year six cross-channel racecourses were allocated New Year's Day fixtures. However, a refusal on the part of Tote staff to work in the aftermath of this historic New Year's Eve has led the British Horse Racing Board to surrender on the issue.

This evening's feature race is the Killone Estates Handicap Chase, and, with half the field out of the handicap proper, the way is clear for J P McManus's Sea Fisher to defy top weight.

His last two runs have been his best efforts in the past 12 months. At Cork in April he ran away with the Low Low Handicap Chase, scoring buy nine lengths from Jimmy Dan, and although he was beaten next time out at Roscommon three weeks later, a lefthanded leap at the second last fence deprived him of valuable momentum.

Thereafter he could not get on terms with Truckinabout and Legatissimo, both of whom were in receipt of chunks of weight.

Up to his retirement last autumn, Christy Roche had shared the riding at Aidan O'Brien's stable with Seamus Heffernan, and I take the hint when he books Seamus for the five-year-old If Only I Had Time.

In the majority of his starts last year, he ran at Grade One tracks, and now he is to be found competing for the Rover Island Maiden which is confined for horses so far removed from the top grade as to be almost invisible. To qualify, these four-year-olds and upwards have had to run at least three times under any Rules of Racing and never been in the first three.

With a £7,000 purse, the Mean Fiddler Fillies Maiden is aimed at a better type of maiden, and Charlie Swan should collect the major share with Sharavogue Cookie who ran a good race on her debut against Aspiration.

Colins Double credited his owner/trainer Cathal McCarthy with the first hurdle race at Galway, and has his chance in the Kiely Gaule Maiden, while Native Queen has the best form credentials in the bumper.