Get caught up on Deep Bramble
DEEP Bramble can cap a glorious few years as a trainer for the young West Country handler Paul Nicholls by taking the Martell Grand National which is simulcast live from Aintree as the final race on tonight's Sha Tin card. Nicholls has been a chasing man through and through from the days he was a young jockey making his way at Josh Gifford's yard just a stone's throw away from where David Oughton used to drill his team in the picturesque West Sussex village of Findon which nestles snuggly into the South Downs, below some of the finest and most natural turf gallops to be found anywhere. Nicholls rode numerous top chasers in his day and, one spring, when he was recovering from injury, I bumped into him at the Cheltenham Festival. We'd known each other since those Gifford days and he was now as much an assistant trainer to David Barons, the man responsible for introducing the New Zealand jumpers into British racing on a wholesale basis, as a jockey.
I thought that Barons could win the four-mile amateur jockeys race at the Festival. 'You're right,' Paul said emphatically. 'And what's more we'll have the second as well.' That they did. Topsham Bay, available at 50-1 returned the 40-1 winner, and the runner-up, Royal Battery, came home at 33-1. Unfortunately, in those days I didn't know a quinella from a quail's egg. But the 50-1 was good enough and on the same night I met the girl who I was to live with for the next 51/2 years. Just goes to show what can happen when you set foot inside a racecourse. As for the National. Nicholls set Deep Bramble for this race and this race only once it became obvious he was not going to have him right for a crack at some of the big staying handicaps earlier in the season. This is the reason Deep Bramble has just has the one run and he shaped very well, too. That pipe-opener will have brought him on considerably and Deep Bramble will be partnered by the young riding sensation Tony McCoy.
His form is well up to National standard as last season Deep Bramble was a quality winner of two of the top staying handicaps for chasers. Rough Quest is clearly the one they all have to beat as he is 19 pounds better off at today's weights than he would have been had the handicapper had the knowledge of his recent Gold Cup second to Imperial Call. But the National weights are framed well in advance and Rough Quest will start one of the hottest favourites in years and rightly so.
The big question mark, though, is how much the Gold Cup will have taken out of Terry Casey's gelding. Son Of War is in fine form and has to be respected.
So, too, must Superior Finish who is trained by the Queen of Aintree, Jenny Pitman, and ridden by the King, Richard Dunwoody.
No one, not even Fred Winter, has ridden Aintree better than the brilliant Dunwoody whose victories on West Tip and Miinnehoma were nothing short of perfection. The old-timer Party Politics is set to be around the placings while the best outsider could be another veteran, Rust Never Sleeps.