Monday Musings: A Grey Area

A week ago, when talking to Nicky Richards in the morning when he had sent three horses to Ayr – he won in the afternoon with 4/1 on shot Upon Tweed - we had a quick chat about one of his other runners, writes Tony Stafford. Red Cadillac had narrowly won his previous race at Carlisle and as a result he was carrying 11st13lb in this £4k to the winner handicap hurdle.

“I expect our horse will run well, that is unless Gordon Elliott’s boys are coming with their betting boots on”. Like three other runners on the day, King Gris was to be ridden by Sean Bowen. Running off 73, therefore in receipt of 25lb from Nicky’s horse, King Gris, owned by the Sette A Milano Syndicate, was 5lb wrong, as his official mark was a bargain-basement 68!

By the time of the race at 2.45 p.m., as the Editor and I were just about on the dessert course at the Horserace Writers and Photographers Association lunch in London, Elliott and the champion jockey already had two wins on the board. At the off, King Gris, 5/2 against at one point in the morning, was 11/4 on and won comfortably doing only what was needed by Bowen to land the odds.

The official margin, which could clearly have been extended if Bowen (and no doubt Elliott) had wished, was two lengths. After that in the seven-horse affair over the minimum trip it was 7 lengths, 6½, 9½, 3¾ and half a length. Strung out like washing on the line as the pre-race market suggested they would be.

Probably struggling to keep a straight face afterwards speaking to Racing TV, Gordon Elliott said, “It was nip and tuck going to the last, but King Gris won which is the most important thing, and he has a good attitude. That was a low-grade race but hopefully he'll be able to win a couple more.” No doubt! Richards’ guess is that he could be a 120 horse.

Red Cadillac, of course, was second and having done his best against what clearly were virtually impossible odds, his connections are going to have to pay a price. As Richards said yesterday, “No doubt after this he’ll go up in Tuesday’s new ratings and from there it will be harder for us to find another race with him.”

Reflecting yesterday morning in response to my reminding him of the event, he said, “There’s been hell on about it. I’ve had calls about it, but I think the BHA are to blame for allowing such a situation to arise.

“This was a Class 5, 0-100 race. During Covid, the rules were changed to prevent Irish stables having runners in races over here at Class 5. That has since been rescinded, but why I’ve no idea. We struggle enough to beat their horses in the top races – look at what Il Etait Temps did to Jonbon and co at Sandown. If we must contend with apparent set-ups like King Gris, what chance do we have?”

So, how did King Gris, a former Irish pointer with a very close third as the best of three runs on his card for owner-trainer Denis Paul Murphy, manage to arrive at a jumps rating of 68, equating to a flat mark in the early/mid 20s?

A short time after that promising pointing third I referred to, King Gris was gelded and it was only a few weeks later that he turned out in a hurdle race at Bangor under the auspices of Merseyside trainer Patrick Morris. He was a 25/1 shot, reflecting that point-to-point effort just a couple of months earlier but finished ninth of ten and was beaten a mammoth 90 lengths.

Next came Morris’s local track Aintree, where King Gris was fifth of six, beaten 63 lengths at 150/1. The final qualifying effort was at Cartmel. There, starting 250/1, and ridden as at Aintree by Charlie Todd, he was last of nine finishers. Job done – three runs from April 24 to May 28.

That was the last we saw of him until Monday a week ago.

The most intriguing element of the story must surely be why he was sent to Morris after the gelding operation if he was eventually destined for one of the top Irish jumping yards. Indeed, the stable that is second only to the magical Willie Mullins.

Morris has been training since 2002 with runners on the flat since 2004 and, apart from two blanks during that time, he has been a regular winner. In 2025 he boasts a decent strike-rate with 14 winners, a tally beaten only three times with the peak of 19 coming in 2011.

Coincidentally, the day of King Gris’ Ayr coup, Morris had a winner later on at Wolverhampton, then one the following day at Newcastle, and another on Saturday back at Dunstall Park. No reason then not to send a horse to Morris? Maybe, but here’s another coincidence. The trainer has run only two individual horses over jumps last season and this. They are King Gris and the useful chaser Royal Deeside who has won twice this term.

The coincidence? Morris’s last jump runners before King Gris and Royal Deeside had been as long ago as in 2011, the time of his best flat season. In all, before 2024/25 he sent out a total of 29 sporadic runners over the quarter-century for a single jumping success.

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If you want a strike-rate at the other end of the scale, how about Sara Bradstock, widow of Mark Bradstock and daughter of my long-term Daily Telegraph colleague John Oaksey. After the Bradstocks’ Mr Vango won a 3m6f chase in testing ground at Exeter two seasons back by 50 lengths, I thought he would knock the Irish off their collective perches at Cheltenham in the National Hunt Chase.

That proved beyond him at that stage, but last winter he went unbeaten through a forensically chosen three-race campaign, culminating with success in the Midlands Grand National over four and a quarter miles at Uttoxeter, a couple of weeks before the Grand National.

Mr Vango will now have the big race on his agenda next March, having come through a trial go over the big-race fences in Saturday’s Becher Chase (3m2f). Having looked beaten and running off top weight of 12st, from a peg 32lb higher than when winning that race at Exeter and 9lb higher than Uttoxeter, he was as unlucky a loser as you can find.

That said, in Twig he met an equally determined and deserving runner from the Ben Pauling stable, ridden as usual by Beau Morgan, son of Twig’s owner.

Twig had been my long-priced nap for the 2025 Grand National and, in running tenth of the 34, was the second home-trained finisher intruding on the Irish juggernaut’s private carving up of the £1 million prizemoney. With Ben saying he “wouldn’t swop him”, for some reason I preferred to look elsewhere for my best bet on Saturday and grimaced as the close-up showed his head down with his rival’s up to get the better of a wonderful finish.

Every time Sara sends out a runner under Rules, I think back to all those years when her father and I comprised the Sunday Telegraph writing team at the Grand National.

While John was crafting his wonderful words for the larger, later editions in terms of readership, I was the “sprinter” charged with doing the fast version of events for the Irish, Scottish and Northern readership.

We operated from a house across the road from the track, with a phone in every room and shared with Brough Scott and others those facilities in Chasandi, the home of a very nice Scouser family. No phones in the track, no computers to put the words together, just a disembodied telephonist taking your words back in Fleet Street to send on to the printers.

One of the top writers at the time was Christopher Poole, a giant, genial, rotund chap who worked for the London Evening Standard. If you thought our system in today’s world would be considered tortuous, Chris had to relate his to his own travelling telephonist, Max, who would then repeat the words back to Fleet Street! If Mr Vango does beat all those Irish stars next spring, even I won’t be able to resist a tear or two remembering John and quite a few others too.

 - TS

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