Bailey banking on Imperial Aura to make most of home advantage
Hpugnacious TV host, whose targets have included many sports stars, has at last had his comeuppance
If there is one advantage Kim Bailey has as the most local trainer to Cheltenham it is that the five-mile journey to the racecourse, at least, will not tire out his horses for the Festival next week.
It is 26 years since Bailey won both the Champion Hurdle with Alderbrook and Gold Cup with Master Oats. When he sent the championship-winning pair from Lambourn they were part of a team of just five runners he had for that year’s meeting.
The six he has earmarked for next week is one of his bigger teams and the quality is there, even if replicating 1995 by winning two major championship races will be difficult.
Imperial Aura, winner of the 2½-mile novice chase last year, is second favourite for the Ryanair, First Flow is as short as 10-1 to give him the Champion Chase, which would complete the set of Cheltenham’s holy trinity of races, while it would not be the greatest surprise were Vinndication to run into the money in the Stayers Hurdle.
“The Ryanair is extremely competitive but Imperial Aura has every right to be one of the favourites,” said Bailey. “It’s been the target since he won there a year ago. It was disappointing he unseated his rider last time, but it does mean he’s unbelievably fresh.”
The surprises First Flow keeps producing are nice ones. “He’s in very good form,” said Bailey. “He was spectacular at Ascot [beating the reigning Champion Chaser Politologue seven lengths, his sixth win a row]. He’s only run once before at Cheltenham, in the
Supreme in 2018, which was a disaster. But he’d had enough that season and his owner Tony Solomons and myself decided the horse might not get another chance to run at the Festival, and here we are going for the Champion Chase.
“The horse is in a really good place, he’s improved from Ascot and he’s a happy horse at the moment. Left-handed is a bit of an ‘if ’, but he won at Wetherby. He has kept on surprising us and if you’d said he’d be 10-1 for the Champion Chase next week I wouldn’t have believed you.”
Wherever Piers pitches up after his diva sashay from the TV set and GMB exit, he will be as visible as ever
Oh for Alastair Cook and Jonathan Trott to have been on a Gogglebox sofa yesterday morning when Piers Morgan found the critique of a weatherman too much to bear and flounced off the set of a TV programme – his own TV programme.
It would have been wonderful to
Can’t stand the heat: Piers Morgan looks lost for words during the stormy Good Morning Britain see the reaction of Graeme Swann, as well, when poor Piers unclipped his microphone.
In fact, if all the sportsmen and sportswomen who have been lambasted by Morgan for supposedly cowardly acts over the past decade or so could have been shown at that delicious moment, they would have filled huge banks of TV screens, Ranganation-style, giggling at the irony of it all. Later, it was announced that Morgan had left Good Morning Britain. Good riddance, Piers? You might wish. The multi-millionaire still has huge platforms on Twitter and a high-profile website and will be as visible and as controversial as ever.
Yet wherever he pitches up, those who Piers pilloried with no empathy whatsoever will always recall the bizarre scenario in the London Studios. There was Morgan, the great sabre-rattler of the “Just Man Up” brigade, unable to sit there and listen to Alex Beresford, a meteorologist who usually scares people stiff by revealing there is a low front coming in off the Azores. Beresford gave the self-appointed “Duke of Sucking it up” a few home truths about the Duchess of Sussex. “I understand you had a personal relationship with Meghan Markle and she cut you off,” Beresford opined, in a calm manner that was less Mitchell Johnson and more Austin Mitchell. “She’s entitled to cut you off if she wants to, and yet you continue to trash her.”
And there Piers pranced: Megxit stage left. There is a saying: “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” but Morgan went further than that, heading straight past the vol-au-vents to the green room to have his ego massaged.
As Morgan performed his diva sashay through the open-mouthed camera operators, it was not only possible to hear their sniggers, but also, if you listened very carefully with a tad of imagination, Cook screaming: “Weasel!”, “Captain Coward!” These are the shameless taunts Morgan regularly directed towards the former England batsman. “I know it’s the trendy thing to salute quitters these days,” Morgan tweeted. “But I prefer the Winston Churchill & Douglas Jardine school of British stoicism.”
As Churchill did not say: “If you’re going through hell, keep going (unless that terrifying Alex Beresford is being all beastly).”
Trott might even have been louder than Cook in his ribbing of Morgan, that brother of a lieutenant colonel – if only Piers would ever mention it – whose favourite quote, depending on the weather, is either: “No one is ever hurt. Hurt is in your mind (unless Alex Beresford is being ghastly),” or: “Pressure is a Messerschmitt up your a--- (and if Alex Beresford is on your case).”
Trott, of course, was the cricketer Morgan accused of “doing a runner”, after leaving the 2013-14 Ashes after one Test, paying little heed to the reason stated that the withdrawal was “stress related”.
“Trott couldn’t handle it,” Morgan said. “He quit and went home.”
How did Trott feel about those words? Actually, how do any of Morgan’s targets respond when informed that they simply do not have the backbone?
Morgan did not care; he has continued to play the “yellow” card. Swann was another target, Gareth Bale one of many others – and he had this to say about Nicolas Anelka: “A sulking, whiny, highmaintenance little brat.” Brattish behaviour, eh?
This column does not have the space to detail the vitriol Morgan handed out to Arsene Wenger, but the Frenchman would find it hilarious that Mr Arsenal had just proved that sometimes it does not take the better man to walk away.
We can only pray that after this, Morgan will think twice before laying into a sportsperson, or any person, he believes is not “manning up”.
Morgan stood up to Brett Lee, but he could not handle a few gentle lobs from a weatherman.