Another Saturday, another Grand National.
Here’s what’s going to happen in today’s Scottish Grand National at Ayr I’d say. Portrait King will be a little ponderous, a little big, over the first fence, but he will quickly get into a nice even rhythm, towards the outside, about half way between the front rank and midfield.
He will jump well for Denis O’Regan in the main, he will move up nicely as they leave the back straight for the final time, he will be one of just six or seven horses who will have a realistic chance of winning the race when they level up for home, he will join the front rank over the second last fence, he will jump on at the last, take it up on the run-in and trade at 1.03 in-running before getting mugged on the line by a 33/1 shot who was under pressure from before the turn for home.
Aw no, that was Sunnyhillboy and Richie McLernon and last week’s Aintree version.
The rain hasn’t fallen at Ayr yet, and that isn’t really good news for Portrait King. It was forecast, they said that there was going to be rain last night and rain again today, but it looked like parasol weather, not umbrella weather, there today, and that is not ideal.
Not that he doesn’t handle good ground. He probably isn’t as ground-dependent as it appeared when he danced in at Punchestown on heavy ground in early February, travelling like the best horse in the race from a long way out and then picking up impressively out of the ground to come away from Up The Beat, subsequently fourth in the National Hunt Chase.
The ground wasn’t that soft for the Eider Chase at Newcastle this year, a little unusually, and Portrait King ran out a convincing winner of that race in the end. Okay, so the form hasn’t worked out too well, runner-up Posh Bird was well beaten in the Midlands National since, and fifth-placed Morgan Be has been beaten out of sight in both his runs since. As well as that, the handicapper has raised Maurice Phelan’s horse 9lb for that win.
However, fourth-placed Borris The Blade ran well in a handicap hurdle at Carlisle two weeks ago and, more importantly, it is impossible to know how much Portrait King had in hand at Newcastle. It looked like he was beaten when he made a mistake at the second last fence and Posh Bird went on ahead of him, but the fact that Denis O’Regan was able to kick-start him again, and get him to surge past the mare so readily on the run-in, tells you that he had plenty of energy left.
On top of that, the Eider Chase was not run to suit. They went a slow pace in the early stages of the race, with the result that O’Regan’s main difficulty was in settling his horse. Portrait King is such a fluent jumper of fences that his talents are maximised when there is a pace on and he can flow through his races. In the Eider, O’Regan was trying to get him to go in tight and pop instead of flow, and when he did make ground in the air, the rider had to take him back in behind runners in order to encourage him to settle again.
With 25 runners in the contest, it is unlikely that the pace will be slow, and that should be in Portrait King’s favour.
He does have to improve again, he has those 9lb to find, and the rest, given that today’s contest is a much stronger race than the Eider was, but he is only seven and we probably still have a long way to go to reach the base of his talent as a staying chaser. We won’t know how good he is until he gets beaten, he should be fresher than most going into today’s race having been off since the Eider, and best odds of 9/1 about him are more than fair.
Others on my shortlist were Harry The Viking, Auroras Encore, Walkon, Our Island and Galaxy Rock. Top of it, though, is Quentin Collonges. Like Portrait King, he is a nice progressive staying novice chaser, and he has been trained for this race from a long way out.
His victory in a beginners’ chase at Doncaster in early February looks even better now since the runner-up that day, The Cockney Mackem, finished second in the Byrne Group Plate at Cheltenham subsequently, and he actually ran a cracker at Kempton on his next run, jumping to his left the whole way and still only going down by three lengths to the potentially very useful Problema Tic.
He will be much happier going left-handed, the handicapper has left him on his Kempton mark of 134, which sees him set to carry a mere 10st 2lb, he will love the goodish ground, and he is a horse who likes to race up with the pace, as four of the last five winners of this race have. He also looks a little over-priced at 16/1.
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