Bookies’ Christmas benefit

By Pat Keane

Saturday, January 07, 2012


BOOKMAKERS are generally rather coy about admitting they have had a good day, or a good meeting, but this week a number accepted that Leopardstown at Christmas had been rather tasty for them.


There’s always a but with these lads, however, and a further explanation revealed they were seriously in need of a decent cash injection, after a couple of bad months.

Personally, I never lose any sleep over on-course, in contrast to off-course, bookmakers getting a few quid. They stand up on the box, put their own money at risk, invite you in, go toe-to-toe and may the best man win.

Looking back over the results for the four days at Leopardstown you can see why most, if not all, managed to show a profit.

For a number of months horses trained by Willie Mullins have had them very much on the back foot and if the Carlow bandwagon had rolled relentlessly on over the Christmas then there might be less demand for the aforementioned boxes in the future.

Mind you Mullins had a reasonably good Leopardstown, managing six winners, and four of them went off favourite.

But that told only part of the tale. The real story was that he supplied no less than nine beaten favourites.

They were Marasonnien (4-6), Champagne Fever (4-5), Sarabad (7-4), Aupcharlie (30-100), Sous Les Cieux (4-9), On His Own (7-2), Mourad (4-5), Thousand Stars (1-1) and Vesper Bell (4-5).

Now there were some really short-priced ones beaten among that lot and they were surely the difference between success and failure for the layers.

The other interesting aspect is that none of Mullins’ six winners was ridden by Ruby Walsh. He was at Kempton on the Monday with Kauto Star, so Paul Townend did the honours on Blackstairmountain at Leopardstown.

Two of Mullins’ winners were in bumpers and were partnered by his son, Patrick. Two were owned by Gigginstown, thus Davy Russell was in the plate, and the other by J P McManus and he was Tony McCoy’s ride.

Some weeks ago we spoke here about the obvious upsurge in attendances at Irish meetings, largely fuelled by quite magnificent National Hunt racing.

I think Leopardstown and Limerick were hugely successful and right now followers of the game simply cannot have enough of it.

We are all aware that the weather this Christmas was particularly benign, but an attendance of 54,750 at Leopardstown and almost 25,000 at Limerick was mighty impressive.



Read more: http://www.irishexaminer.com/sport/racing/bookies-christmas-benefit-179341.html#ixzz1ilRPsSdY