So Pleasant At Aintree

Tony Keenan fancies a 25-1 Willie Mullins horse for the big race.

Cheltenham form proves to be the strongest of the National Hunt programme year in, year out. Since 2010, there have been 147 winners at the Aintree National meeting; the horses that had their last run at the Cheltenham Festival are 89/812 for a strikerate of 11% while the rest are 58/1,430 for a strikerate of 4%.

If you isolate the winners and placed horses the numbers are even better. Of the 70 horses that won at Cheltenham and went on to Aintree, 23 won for a strikerate of 33%, a level-stakes profit of 15.84 points and an actual over expected of 1.10. The placed horses (those that finished second, third or fourth) were 40/208 for a strikerate of 19%, a level stakes profit of 108.59 points and an actual over expected of 1.12. The moral of the story is simple: don’t try to be too clever.

There has been plenty of controversy about the Liverpool National itself in the lead-up to the race with Phil Smith taking plenty of stick for his weighting of the Gigginstown horses; unusually for an Irish person, I’m actually with the BHA handicapper on this one.

You could argue he might have compressed some of the top Irish stayers like Don Poli and Outlander a little more – he had done so with similarly rated UK trained horses in the past – but Michael O’Leary’s vitriolic reactions were well over-the-top and his comments about weight being related to horses falling were at best careless, at worst dangerous. Realistically, a pound or two here and there is unlikely to make a massive difference in a race were adapting to the fences and trip are the most important things; Don Poli was one that looked made for the race but has been taken out in a fit of pique.