About six or seven years ago, I was sure that the animal that we now know as the Pre-Cheltenham Evening would have long since breathed its final breath.
There had been a proliferation of such animals all over the country. From Armagh to Youghal, drive through any small town on any evening within two or three weeks of Champion Hurdle day, and you were certain to happen upon a PCE. From an organiser’s point of view, it was a sinch. Get a jockey, a trainer, a pundit and a comedian, sit them at a table in a community centre, stick a poster on the wall the day before and, hey presto, you had them hanging from the rafters.
But like all good ideas (Blackberry anyone?), there comes a point at which it ceases to be innovative, a time when the imaginations that it had caught are no longer paying attention, when focus has moved on to something even more imaginative, and that point seemed to have been reached with the PCE about six years ago. There were still four or five hundred baying punters at the big ones, biros in hand, ears pricked to attention, but the little ones were struggling, and there was a feeling of tiredness about the whole escapade, a feeling that the PCE was in need of rejuvenation or expulsion.
Six years on, not a bit of it. The PCE as we know it is alive and well and living in Ireland. More common crow than dodo. Perhaps the feeling of tiredness was a symptom of the Celtic era, when everything about old Ireland seemed tired and dated, when people didn’t have time for much except dropping kids to crèches, working in offices or on construction sites until cleaning ladies told them to go home, then going to pubs and parties and telling mates how many houses they thought they owned.
There has been a consolidation of sorts. The big ones have got stronger, year on year, as word has spread about the quality of the evening – Davy gave us a 14/1 winner last year, Oliver Brady is mad – and the small ones have struggled to gain a foothold. Consolidation probably isn’t any harm.
Expectations are realistic now as well. Punters don’t expect to hear a trainer tell them about the horse that they have at home who has 25lb in hand of the handicapper and is a 33/1 shot for the Pertemps. They go along to hear reasoned discussion. At worst, it is an entertaining evening spent with fellow racing nuts that informs a little and whets the appetite a lot. At best, it is that, combined with one or two nuggets of information or opinion that will shape your betting strategy for the week for the better.
Strange the mentality of the punter though. He is still generally less interested in the opinion of the jockey or the trainer or the pundit who has spent hours poring over the form of the Supreme Novices’ Hurdle and come up with a horse who is value at the prices being offered than he is about the information that a trainer or a rider might have to impart about a bumper horse that is working well at home.
Maybe it’s an Irish thing, maybe it’s a one-upmanship thing, that need to have more information than your fellow punter, information that is not readily available in the public domain. Sometimes it’s information that you can impart. Ruby says this won’t be beaten. Makes you look clever.
It’s probably the same phenomenon as the one behind the fact that the bumper is generally the biggest betting race in the betting ring on a normal day’s racing in Ireland, the race in which the least form is available and therefore the one in which stable whispers are at their most paramount. It is why you are asked What do you know? What did you hear? far more often than What is your conclusion? What horse do you think is most over-priced?
Strange that, at a recent PCE, there was as much interest in asking Paul Carberry what Nina thought would win the Cheltenham Bumper as there was in asking him about his own rides at the Festival.
My conclusion? Noble Prince. Still Noble Prince.
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