Colm Greaves: Lark In The Mornin can hit right notes for County glory
Henry's Friend (Ben Jones) wins the Coral Mandarin Chase at Newbury Racecourse. Pic: Healy Racing
Away from the bright lights of the championship races, some of the best value this week can be found in the supporting handicap races. Here are recommendations for an each-way yankee in four of those contests.
Henry’s Friend is an improving eight-year-old chaser, trained local to Cheltenham by forty-one-year-old, Ben Pauling, 41, and will be ridden in the Ultima Handicap Chase by twenty-five-year-old Welsh-born jockey, Ben Jones.
The ambitious Pauling learned his trade as assistant to Nicky Henderson at Seven Barrows before striking out on his own twelve 12 years ago and will be hoping to add to an growing tally of Festival winners even if, annoyingly, his stable star, The Jukebox Man suffered a season-ending injury in January.
Henry’s Friend has won six of his fourteen 14 starts, four of them over fences and he meets many of the trend indicators in the first handicap of the week.
Ten of twelve 12 most recent winners have been aged between seven and nine and to come from near the top of the betting.
A Grade Two winner last year when he took the Reynoldstown Novice Chase at Ascot last spring, he came good this season at the third time of asking at Newbury when he won the Mandarin Handicap Chase by an easy six lengths from Hymac.
Henry’s Friend has only run at Cheltenham once previously and that was when he finished seventh and last behind Corbetts Cross in the National Hunt Chase last March. Pauling blames himself for that lapse believing he’d chosen the wrong race for a horse that had by then gone “off the boil, but he’s a lovely horse who is only going to get better with age”.
This classy animal will be suited by the three-mile trip and will not be inconvenienced by the ground conditions expected this week. He’ll stay the trip well and hit the line hard if in contention up the hill.
Dan Skelton has emerged as an increasingly powerful presence in British racing in recent years and would be the reigning champion trainer had he not been mugged for the title by Willie Mullins in the dying weeks of last season.
Skelton enjoyed his best Festival to date in 2024 with four winners and remarked recently that the “team are better than ever, but you can’t say just because they are better that you are going to have five winners after having four last year. That is highly presumptuous. That’s our sport and that is how it is — I think we have the best squad we have ever had for the Festival, but whether that bears out in the results we will see.” Skelton has attracted, and seems to have quietly enjoyed, some public notoriety when winning the last two editions of the County Hurdle with Langer Dan, who twice belied early season form and improved out of all recognition once the spring daffodils had shown their faces. The handicapper has given Langer Dan a massive wallop in the weights since then and Skelton will be trying to find some more unexposed challengers for the big handicap contests this week. The seven-year-old Milan gelding Catch Him Derry could fit the bill in the Pertemps final on Thursday.
His official rating of 129 will get him into the race near the bottom of the weights. This time last year he was rated at only 96ninety-six, but his four wins since then, including in a qualifier for Thursday at Exeter last month shows the improvement he has made recently, and it would be unlike Skelton not to find a little more during Cheltenham week. A progressive, unexposed, and lightly raced contender, Henry’s Friend Catch Him Derry ticks many of the Skelton Festival boxes and should run a big race, especially if the word ‘soft’ appears in the going description
Like Skelton, Joseph O’Brien is another young trainer adept at readying a horse for a big day out in a Festival handicap. He won the concluding Martin Pipe hurdle with Early Doors in 2019 and again three years later with Banbridge, who may be the only realistic challenge to Galopin Des Champs in Friday’s Gold Cup.
O’Brien won his first Festival race with Band of Outlaws in the Fred Winter Juvenile Handicap and followed that up with Lark In The Mornin in the same race last year.
The five-year-old’s only remaining entry this week is in the County Hurdle and off a relatively low rating of 132 he will need a few higher weighted horses to drop out if he is to get a run on Friday.
O’Brien recently said: “We’re hoping he gets into one of the handicap hurdles. The County Hurdle would be our preference, he is talented, and his comeback run was promising. If we can get him back there in good shape, he’ll hopefully acquit himself very well again.” The German bred has only seen a racetrack once so far this season when finishing an eye-catching seventh position behind Enniskerry at Leopardstown at Christmas having been well supported beforehand. Not seen on a racecourse since, he will have been prepared expertly by O’Brien.
He likes the track, the going, and the time of year and Lark In The Mornin has been backed significantly on ante-post markets and is vying for favouritism at around 6-1.
Surprisingly for a race named in honour of his father, Johnny, Nicky Henderson has won the Grand Annual just twice in the last thirty 30 years. With no entries, he won’t be moving the needle on that that statistic this time around either.
Run on the same day on the same course and distance of the Grade One Champion Chase, this handicap chase normally attracts significantly more runners than the earlier main event, so fortune normally favours the brave and jockeys need to ride the race with their elbows well out. A mistake of significance at any of the thirteen 13 fences normally ends hopes of victory.
Like most contests at Cheltenham this week, previous Festival form is advantageous. The joint favourites, Unexpected Party and Libberty Hunter were first and second in the race last year and with luck in running both are sure to be prominent again.
A less exposed, contender is the six-year-old Jazzy Mattie, trained by Cian Collins at Robinstown, near Navan. Collins bought the horse from the Gordon Elliott stable at the high-profile Caldwell disposal sale for €50,000 fifty-thousand-euro last year.
This could, in time, prove to be an absolute bargain price for an animal that won the Boodles Hurdle here a couple of years ago in what was, tragically, Michael O’Sullivan’s second and final Festival victory.
Collins seems to have rekindled Jazzy’s lost enthusiasm for racing with a couple of confidence-boosting wins at Wexford and Sligo but his narrow defeat by Path’Doroux at the course when he was wrong at the weights looks like the best indicator of his chances tomorrowon Wednesday. Handily rated at 131 over fences, he should get in near the bottom of the handicap and hopefully challenge up the hill to record a very poignant victory
