JP McManus, his owner, has announced that three-time Champion Hurdle winner Istabraq died at 32. He was initially trained on the Flat by John Gosden, and this son of Sadler’s Wells went on to become one of the greatest and most popular National Hunt horses of the modern era after joining Aidan O’Brien. Istabraq won…
The Twin Cities calls
Sandy Lane previews this week’s PGA Tour event, the 3M Open, to be played at TPC Twin Cities in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Last week’s Open Championship, played mostly in weather that was regularly described on TV as ‘filthy’, was a roller-coaster ride for players and spectators alike. Royal Troon bared its teeth, gobbled up five of…
Few public servants adhere to Nolan – and don’t care
As the new mob beds in at Westminster and a bunch of sads implode because Jose Esplanade is a brute and Jesus della Saucisson isn’t brute enough when it comes to training for a faux-dance competition, the entire question of good and bad behaviour is under the spotlight. It’s poor form to shoot at the…
Sandy Lane’s Golfing tips for The Open Championship – Royal Troon
Last week’s Genesis Scottish Open served up plenty of dramatic moments, not least on the very last green when the Canadian Open hero Bob MacIntyre holed out a 22-foot putt for par to win the championship. Bob is now near the top of Sandy’s Christmas Card list, having secured a 33-1 payout for us just…
More TV racing than you can shake a stick at!
The day has started well with my “greening up” the Betfair Golf position, thanks to Ludvig Aberg’s 4-shot lead in the Scottish Open. As I have said before, Sandy Lane’s tips are focused on the sports odds betting market- but with multiple selections to cover, I prefer to use the betting exchange market. When you back…
By the Centre – Quick Left
I stayed up late to watch the much-delayed Joe Biden Press Conference, which kicked in at about 00:45. I wish I had a pint of whatever juice they’d given him before he went on—or possibly it was a full blood dope—whatever, it worked. He appeared fluent, cognitive, and old. He’ll be older in three or…
The last PGA match before The Open.
Last week’s John Deere Classic proved to be both enjoyable and profitable for followers of this column. The final round was stress-free with the impressive 25-1 shot Davis Thompson setting up an impregnable lead early on and two of our other selections, Ben Griffin (60-1) and Aaron Rai (20-1) battling their way into T5th and…
Game Set and Match at the Newmarket July meeting
You will have been aware of some technical issues in my recent output, capped on Saturday night by an enormous peal of thunder and a lightning bolt that unbeknownst to us, had blown out the main internet and wifi router. As it was, we woke on Sunday morning to the voice of Alexa whining that…
Nations, like stars, are entitled to eclipse…
… All is well, provided the light returns and the eclipse does not become endless night. Dawn and resurrection are synonymous. The reappearance of the light is the same as the survival of the soul. VICTOR HUGO Les Mis Vic knew a thing or two about national eclipses, and I feel sure he would have…
And the vote goes to…
At its simplest, the range of our political issues, specifically in Lambourn, is pretty narrow, and mainly the normal local, rural ones. We are in the Newbury constituency, so there is probably a large experiential gap between Newbury and, to a lesser extent, Hungerford and our little town. Our issues are those of the countryside,…
US PGA Tour: The John Deere Classic
Last week’s Rocket Mortgage Classic in Detroit brought us smiles and tears. Having had the overnight or joint overnight leaders after each of the first three rounds, Sunday’s action was eagerly awaited. Akshay Bhatia and Aaron Rai continued to play well, and Davis Thompson was on the move. Their closest rivals were the unreliable Cameron…
Biden, Southgate, Archer and Prescott. You’d do business with that firm surely?
I watched the CNN presidential debate this morning, with some scenes that may haunt us over the next few months. It was not Presidential on anybody’s behalf. It was rambling, at times incoherent, and above all sad. There was a moment when I thought maybe this was the plan all the time. Run this debate…
US PGA Tour: The Rocket Mortgage Classic
The Rocket Mortgage Classic takes centre stage this week. It’s a low-key event with just Tom Kim representing the world’s top 20 players. Despite having heavily tree-lined fairways, plentiful bunkers and small Poa Annua greens, the Par-72 Donald Ross-designed course is easy meat for the Tour professionals, with an average winning total of around 23…
None Of The Above
I had forgotten the possibility embraced by a surprising number of democracies or other systems such as that used in Russia: a ballot paper would have a box allowing you to clarify that the presented candidates or parties are simply unelectable in the voters’ opinion. It is based on the principle that the ability to…
Who’s a clever boy then? Not Farage apparently
I got through lunch with the former press baron, with only a tiny side-step into Brexit, which has marked me forever to 47½% of his lunch guests as an idiot, ogre, illiterate and fascist. Inevitably, it started when I tried to express some sympathy in purely factual terms with Farage’s current entanglement. As an aside,…
2024 Royal Ascot – Day Five (Sat 22nd June)
A dreadful day yesterday, with not even a hint of potential success. Chesham Stakes (Listed) – 2:30pm Karl Burke’s two-year-olds have been a wonder this week 5R-2W-1P, and he runs MOTWAHIJ here. He ran an encouraging race at Hamilton and should progress with this step up in distance. Since it was purchased in the Craven…
2024 Royal Ascot – Day Four (Fri 21st June)
21st June DRAW BIAS The first ten home in the Britannia yesterday (ov er 8f on the straight course) were 15, 16, 31, 33, 23, 29, 19, 20, 17 . It is thus reasonable to assume that high draws might have a bias today in some of the big handicaps, notably the Palace Of Holyrood…
2024 Royal Ascot – Day Three (Thurs 20th June)
Norfolk Stakes (G2) – 2:30 pm My first shortlist was cut to two with the final decs, ARIZONA BLAZE – WHISTLEJACKET and I think both are good for a podium. I just can’t see Wes Ward going home empty-handed, and SATURDAY FLIRT has been bought by Mrs Fitri Hay since winning on her debut at…
Rudderless, leaderless, adrift – and 25k for a new propeller!
A call from a Mate, (not not him, the other one), brightened the morning. Someone else’s catalogue of woes is always heartening, and his first-world trials and tribulations are truly tear-inducing. In no particular order, the livery, hunting stables, eventing yard and all-purpose equine money drain that is home is now surrounded on three sides…
2024 Royal Ascot – Day Two (Weds 19th June)
Queen Mary Stakes (G2) – 2:30 pm 17th June: I’m sticking Andrew Balding’s KASSAYA, a ½ sister to 200 Gns winner Chaldean. she has some terrific form lines developed from her Salisbury debut, including 3rd Megalithic running-up in the Woodcote at Epsom and the fifth winning since. Her Nottingham LTO victory looked very impressive, and…
Royal Ascot 2024 – At A Glance
Selections from the trends shortlist based on five-day entries Final Selections TUESDAY JUNE 18 Queen Anne Stakes (G1) – 2:30 pm AUDIENCE 3 pts Win – MALJOOM 2 pts e/w – DOLAYLI 2 pts e/w Sort List of Three: BIG ROCK 6/1 – AUDIENCE 10/1 – INSPIRAL 9/4 Away from the trends: POKER FACE 33/1…
2024 Royal Ascot – Day One (Tues 18th June)
16th June : The going at Ascot was described as good to firm, good in places at 11.02 am on Sunday. Sunday has been generally dry with a few isolated showers, and Monday is forecast to be largely dry with sunny spells. Tuesday and Wednesday are also now forecast to be generally dry, with the…
Can anyone stop Scottie winning The U.S. Open Championship? Sandy Lane thinks so.
Scottie Scheffler’s extraordinary domination of this year’s PGA tournaments soared to even greater heights last week when he reminded us of his tenacity and consistency, holding off a determined challenge from our selection, Collin Morikawa, to win the Memorial in Dublin. Ohio. Morikawa did us proud, however, as did another of our each-way picks, Ludvig…
Everything has a value to someone
I have the unfortunate trait of saying out loud what is on my mind, which you will have gathered over time from these scribblings. The sort of situation where X says Willie Mullins should only have three runners at Cheltenham, and I tell X that not only is he wrong, but that he is an…
They did all that to save us from tyranny, and we still end up with a fool.
A very jolly evening ended a week full of many pains, memories, dashed hopes, and random acts of kindness and self-sacrifice. The evening was a local fund-raiser for a small village church, which involved a wine-tasting competition. Already, I can sense your heart sinking, as did mine, at the thought of the arrayed ranks of…
“I’d like to play for an Italian club, like Barcelona.”
As Ian Rush unwittingly inferred above, much of Europe has homogenised into the same set of global brands, overpriced Cappuccinos, unfriendly natives demanding their beaches back, and very ordinary hotels that have based their pricing on The Burj’s Presidential Suite. However, I have always loved Europe, most Southern Europeans, and a few Noggys. I sympathise…
The PGA Tour: The Memorial. At Muirfield. In Dublin. In Ohio
Sandy Lane previews this week’s USPGA event, the Memorial at Muirfield Village in Dublin, Ohio Watching Robert MacIntyre’s maiden PGA Tour victory in last week’s Canadian Open was genuinely refreshing. With his rugged-featured Dad on the bag, the shy Scotsman proved to be a natural front-runner, and his humility shone out in the post-tournament…
Derby Day
It is a statistical mystery to me how I have participated in three different Derby sweepstakes at three different events over the last three days and not one of our various syndicated tickets has been within fifty of any drawn number. We could have purchased a Derby horse for next year for a fraction of…
Derby Dinner – Lunch – Derby Dinner – Funeral – Oaks – Wake – Derby
The back cracker has done her job as far as she can, and the physio has called the knee problem as a meniscus and told me to forget Strictly. As far as is physically possible, I am thus fit for The Derby Double Header. The Derby Double Header is notoriously difficult in the pantheon of…
RBC Canadian Open
The Canadian Open Championship is nomadic. This year, it returns to the classic Hamilton course, which last staged the event in 2019. This picturesque arena was established in 1904. It was designed by Harry Colt, who also set up the fabled Wentworth course in England. It is a Par-70 parkland course, featuring small undulating poa annua greens….
A weekend of endless action and promises
Alcohol, TV and sport – that is a reasonable summary of the rest of this summer, as far as I can make out, with a small chance of nuclear fallout. Between now and July 4th—and I have already written Smarmier’s victory speech on the theme of Independence —we have to suffer 247 screen-to-audio-to-print coverage of…
Brigadier Gerard – who knew…
Tonight is Brigadier Gerard’s night, the wealthiest race evening in the calendar, the bane of my life for several years, the provider of much fun in others. In brief, worthy of note. It was the bane of my life because it tended to be run on the Thursday before the Derby – a day when…
PGA Tour: Charles Schwab Challenge
Firstly, hearty congratulations to Xander Schauffle for his magnificent triumph at Valhalla last week. He had been my headline selection for the Masters, but Heigh Ho! Xander’s victory was made even sweeter because he held off a huge last-round surge by a player from the LIV circuit, Bryson DeChambeau. Onwards and upwards to this week’s…
Racing’s Garden needs some professional work doing.
The Lambourn garden has just become an issue. Last week, we removed dead wood, cleared undergrowth, and installed a new boundary dog-proof fence, which has resulted in our having unfettered views of things we don’t want to see. The laws of unintentional consequences have just bitten us. We can see from the original planting that…
Another exciting Premierisation of a perfectly good Sunday.
I watched the big fight last night. The Hon. summed it up very accurately: “If he keeps showing off like that, he’s going to get a thick lip.” I have no idea where she learned that sort of language – but she was spot on, except that the whole of his face took a battering….
Thank you Brian for my good dinner, Amen
A very happy day at Newbury yesterday, hidden away from The Hon and the Nephew in a box with Nicky Henderson, the Lambourn Jet Set, some City High Flyers and assorted other good eggs. The event was a charity lunch Nicky has chaired for almost a decade in aid of Starlight, a children’s charity that…
York Day 3 – and some of Newbury
Nothing much to report today. South West Water has admitted to failings… more train strikes are coming… the collusion between China and Russia over who gets what bits after the wheat fields are all irradiated remains intact and en route… the BHA remains in power and hasn’t been disbanded by ARC… really it’s pretty much…
York Dante Meeting Day 2
I thought the day would go swimmingly well—we were spot on in the first and somewhat foolishly swerved the opportunity to call the 32/1 forecast. But from then on, we might as well have been talking gobbledygook. Somewhere in the middle of it all, the Slovakian PM was shot. I kept half-an-eye on that and…
The USPGA 2024 – Seven against the field.
The late Keith Elliot had various concepts and theories he utilised in his sports betting – one of them caught the sports betting world’s imagination and was known as The Nappy Factor. In his Golf books of the late 1990’s he set out the belief that new, or expectant fathers often improve their level of…
Day 1 of The York Dante Meeting – and a plea for fairness
When The Deluge comes – and please save your money by NOT punting on a hung parliament – the new Culture Secretary (in charge of our sport) will likely be somebody who changed her name from Singh to Debbonnaire. In that one astonishingly hubristic move, Ms Thangam D. not only managed to misspell her new…
The Lingfield Classic trials – Ascot and a very rare 10 pt bet.
It was another unclever day. I did work out on the back of an envelope that if I had backed Stalls 1-5 inclusive over the three days and backed them with The Tote in Trifectas at £60 a pop, I would have made over £800 profit. That said, you would have been getting a little…
Chester May Meeting Day 3 – plus Marmalade, Greek girls and American fakes
This morning, a propos of absolutely nothing, I spent too much time pondering over the essential matters of modern living that had grasped my attention in the last 24 hours – quite apart from the wretched draw at Chester. The first was whether The Savoy or Claridges makes its own Marmalade from scratch, on-site. I…
Chester May Festival Day 2
It was a sad day yesterday at Chester – but also pretty weird. The weirdness emanated from the results, which even my late Nanny knew enough to exclaim as she made our breakfast after a night out with her friends from Liverpool: “You need to have your draws down very low at Chester” In the…
Chester May Meeting Day 1.
There’s a line in Peter Pan which goes: “In time they could not even fly after their hats. Want of practice, they called it; but what it really meant was that they no longer believed.” I suspect, too, that many of my regular readers have become incapable of going after their wind-tossed racing trilbys because…
The City of Troy lies somewhere over the rainbow together with Tory hopes.
Somewhere near your home at this very moment are two different houses. One of them has Sabrina Habitat-Scatter-Cushion dabbing her eyes at the breakfast table and saying, “What is to become of us?” At the other end of the village, Roger Bader-Kite tells his house guests over breakfast, “We have to gather round the old…
A little bit of French, a touch of Swahili and a dollop of nag. Here’s a lot of tips
Back at 2:00am, from a delicious dinner in London at Le Colombier next to the Royal Marsden. Super service, a sensational wine list, a good collection of Chelsea’s finest 70-somethings who patently regarded the place as their caff, and some excellent food, including a very good Fricassée de Rognons de Veau à la Dijonnaise. The…
Punchestown and The Guineas. Col. Tufty Bufty tells Lawrence what he thinks of the entries
45 runners declared for the whole Newmarket card… what can I say? At Goodwood in the 3:50, there is £40k in guaranteed prize money, with five runners. Why?? It can’t be on the ground conditions; it was G/S when the final decs were called. Its – Its… what is the word??? Meanwhile, the frantic social…
Punchestown Day 3
It’s a terribly busy week, so straight in and on. I have popped the dismal results under each post. I shall surely hit form soon! I had started to write about dinner last night, but it was so ghastly, and one or two of the crowd were so deeply sanctimonious, ill-informed and self-opinionated in the…
Punchestown Day 2 plus Ascot
You will have seen that my sources led me astray and that EMBASSY GARDENS ran like a dog, and not a very well one at that. I am waiting to hear what exactly went wrong. If that had been our only disappointment yesterday, I could have coped, but overall, in financial terms, it was a…
Punchestown Day 1
I am always caught unawares by the arrival of May and the vast voids of public holidays and people doing zip that it brings. Any interrogation of any service, engineer, tradesman, driver, cleaner, stone waller, thatcher, or bottle washer comes with a sharp intake of breath as though one has just made an accidental pass…