Fishing deep for Roach

When I look back at the way I approached racing –  and I’m talking about 60 years ago and more  –  I have to say there have been fundamental changes almost across the board.

Who or what did I like most? An easy one, really, because Bill Wightman was my hero, closely followed by Les Hall and Richmond Sturdy. I was a soft touch when it came to lightweight jockeys who had no trouble in making 7st 7lbs and if Herbert Blagrave booked David East or Sammy Millbanks I never considered defeat. Ray Reader wasn’t far behind and up north I was more than happy with L C Parkes. Yes, I know people called him Cliff but he was L C Parkes to me, his name standing out near the foot of the handicap in whichever newspaper you bought.

Sturdy was on to John Reid when he could still claim 7lbs and David Ashforth came to know Diana Jones pretty well. She stood out in amateur rider races in the days when there was a much larger gap between the truly talented and the merely optimistic.

I seldom missed a John Sutcliffe Jr runner in a big Ascot handicap and I thought Ron Smyth an outright genius when it came to winning an early novices hurdle with horses that could barely put one foot in front of another on the level.

Also, horses travelling a long way before motorways criss-crossed the country made particular appeal. As for Bolton trainer Willie Carr, I thought him very clever indeed because his inmates seldom turned out at all but, when they did, it was as if they were bursting to strut their stuff. Most of them were by Constable and carried the names of his paintings  –  Flatford Mill, The Cornfield, The Country Lane, etc. The last-named was so fired up one Bank Holiday she was still trying to kick something down at the start when the tapes went up but still won by four lengths.

Happy days indeed but you’ll have forgotten most of these characters and I’m probably the only one with Marcel Proust’s memory for people and places so long ago. It was a major setback when Eric Alston retired a few years back because he NEVER sent a horse far from Preston unless it had a cracking chance.

At least he had a 14/1 winner near the end when Record Time won tidily on the Newmarket July Course. A day I shall not forget because I listened to it in the Old Duke, a famous jazz pub in Bristol. It was late afternoon and I was the only one in there, listening to Ian Bartlett’s commentary on the telephone.

Long before that I was having dinner with Barty and a lady called Hilda Marshall in a tapas restaurant in Paddington. To this day Hilda supplies bloodstock statistics to clients in America which is not bad going when you consider her early days were spent with Clive Graham and Peter O’Sullevan on the Daily Express racing desk when it was still a respected Beaverbrook paper.

Anyway, the following day I was going to Salisbury and John Sutcliffe Jr had Albert Finney’s Brother Ray in a multi-runner handicap raised 6lbs for winning at Warwick.

If I write the book about favourite horses in middle-of-the-road handicaps, Brother Ray  –  who swept past nineteen rivals  –  will be in there. 15/8 favourite but sometimes you just don’t care and he paid a few bills.

He was ridden by Michael Wigham, who is no-one’s fool, and I should tell you something else about him. About a decade ago my good friend George Materna had a consistent sort, Deeds Not Words, running for Mick Channon at Goodwood and it got up very narrowly for Silvestre de Sousa under a powerful ride. It won a few more for George but maybe rose too high in the weights and joined JF Levins in Ireland.

Remarkably, the horse ran 21 times there without ever looking like winning, whereupon it returned to these shores off a very handy mark indeed and, looked after by Wigham, a Newmarket trainer by this time, proceeded to win EIGHT times in lowish grade.

We don’t know the full story here but we do know that Wigham can set up sequences when he has something to go to war with. At present he has another sprinter, Roach Power, who won five times last season and then apparently lost his way. Too high in the handicap, he has also performed moderately this year but, of course, he is tumbling down again.

I quite agree you can’t have him on current form but we must also bear in mind that, although he is not ‘right’ at the moment, he will be quite a price when he is. I think Wigham will coax him back and I suspect John Egan will be the man on top. You’ll need only a few coins on when everyone is looking the other way. Patience is a virtue.

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