After a few days away in Nairn (in the snow) it was home again a day early to set up and test our new equipment. Elite very kindly set me up remotely whilst working at Aintree and testing finally concluded around 9:30pm Friday night. In between testing the laminator came out for another session for The Grand National whiteboard, then went to bed and messaged the better half to let her know that the house may not be as spick and span as she may have hoped when she returned today.
5:50 is an unfeasibly early alarm call but with, effectively, a 9 race card ahead of us and a 7 hour round trip, needs must. Breakfast forced down in the knowledge that it was an enforced 14 hour fast thereafter and off we set through the gloom.
I really like this meeting- the excitement of the National awaits and it's a decent meeting for us as, although it's not a particularly big crowd, most of our colleagues are at Aintree pitching in even earlier than we had to.
We put up 2 pitches in the Colonel Porter stand with husband and wife(ish) team of Kevin and Amanda charged with running the better pitch whilst Steve did the book and I broke into occasional song between taking bets. J&J stood between us which meant Kev was spared my sporadic renditions of "Let It Snow" whilst I was spared Kev's more frequent yelps of pain from various unknown sources. Steve was 90% book 10% keeping an eye on the Everton game and off we went. Well, sort of. Kev had tech issues and ended up only starting betting around 5 minutes before the first.
1) Bird on the Wire was our biggest loser, Amber Gold a half liability and the well bet Ribeye a taker. We couldn't get the favourite into liability so it ran (small) for us. Steve had the sum total of a quid back hedging. I'm assuming fat finger syndrome when Everton scored- there's no other feasible explanation. Ribeye won easily, we won about a fiver.
2) Short priced favourite alert. Steve was braver than me and stuck a couple of liabilities in on Shighness and Kidman- we expected Geordies Dream to also be a loser but it remained a taker. The 2/5 favourite a good winner for us as we expected it would be and it duly obliged though it looked beaten by Whelans Bridge (also a good winner for us) at one point. Places were good but we laid the forecast so we moved forward but not dramatically
3) Half the crowd were called Chez (or knew somebody who was) and the other half of the crowd had a holiday home in France. This can be the only logical explanation for the whole of the track betting the same horse. Edmond Dantes and Darius Des Sources rounded out our losers. Two liabilities battled it out and the worst one (Go On Chez) triumphed and we were in the red. Too noisy.
4) Rapid Raider attracted similar levels of support as Go On Chez in the previous race but, fortunately for us, didn't attract similar levels of performance. It was a loser for our max and, despite a late rally, never really looked the winner. In a reversal of the previous race we had our two best winners at the head of affairs and the favourite (Morozov Cocktail) was a nice winner but we really wanted our jackpot, Devour, which finished 2nd. Expenses covered once again but felt like we were treading water.
5) Treading water became gasping for air as the first of back to back 3 horse races didn't set the pulses racing and we lost chunkily on the outsider of the 3, See The Sea, and also contrived to lay the forecast to lose there as well. Behind again on the day.
6) The next 3 runner job was a pretty tedious book with barely anything to get excited about but our worst result, The King of May, won after our best result, Buster Valentine, fell. We hadn't laid the forecast though so no damage done but only the tiniest of moves forward and time was running out for us.
7) At last some runners to get stuck into and so we did with Get With It, Johnsons Blue and Golden Chancer all fairly significant liabilities. The original favourite, Warriors Story, drifted alarmingly with a load of our profit on it but won well and we had our best (in some ways only) result of the day so far.
8) In the last we had Kings Creek and Ugo Du Misselot in as our big bogeys plus Old Jewry and Celtic Dancer for half liabilities. We thought we had a great chance when front running Dan Gun, our best result, looked like it may hang on gamely but was swallowed up by Ugo and the favourite Bestiarius and we were grateful that the jolly won and spared us a loss, though contributed very little towards a win either.
9) We met a lovely chap at this point who is working through our blogs. He'd read Cheltenham- we warned him off reading the Friday at Ayr for fear of doing himself a mischief. We'd hoped to find him a winner in the National but it wasn't to be. We don't seem to take loads on the National at Newcastle which always surprises us but we kept a large proportion of what we did take on 50/1 winner Noble Yeats who won a cracking race from Any Second Now who was also a decent winner for us. For the sake of completeness we had liabilities on Minella Times (maximum) plus half liabilities on Delta Work, Samcro and Snow Leopardess and small losers with Blaklion and Brahma Bull. Only one person found the winner and places were ok as well so a good winner to end the day.
We never did use that whiteboard either.
At 4:00 we were losing, by 5:30 we'd knocked in a couple of late goals and made our way north in good spirits. Apart from Kev who suffered a virtual decapitation at my hands when I put away his whiteboard. Either that or a minor glance to his shoulder- it's so hard to tell.
Anyway, early start again tomorrow, this time for the first round of the Golf Club knockout- I've played 4 holes since October and lost to my 10 year old daughter at the Inverness Crazy Golf whilst my opponent tells me he got 42 points at Gleneagles or Carnoustie or somewhere last week and I'm giving him 5 shots. You can have 10s on me... it isn't value.
Good Friday at Newcastle again next week. Considering 2 pitches but never been to this meeting before and we don't have great pitch numbers at Newcastle on the All Weather so may end up just running 1 and give Steve the day off to practice his golf.
Until then...
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