Dave Nevison's Saturday tips: four bets at Sandown

Doddiethegreat has become a bit of a bookmaker’s friend in recent runs, but might be worth keeping the faith with now he is running in the lowest graded handicap hurdle he has ever contested. 

He was very well backed last time, despite being against his in-form stable companion East India Express, but it all went wrong for him at the start when he was hampered, and he was pulled up shortly afterwards.

The nine-year-old has been well fancied for Cheltenham Festival handicaps in the past and has shown enough to suggest that if things went right, he is definitely well enough treated to score, and this Seniors' race which, by definition, will not have improvers in the field, could be a good bit of placing.

Triple Trade’s latest win came the last time that he ran over a distance in excess of two miles, and he defied a handicap mark 8lb higher than the one he runs off here that day.

It certainly looks as though he has been crying out for a return to a distance beyond the minimum, even though he has been pretty consistent and performed with credit on all his starts since.

The Tizzard yard are generally going well at present, and now that Triple Trade is away from open handicap company, he can regain the winning thread. He has won on soft ground before, too.

As an 11-year-old rated in the 120’s, Smarty Wild will not have many more opportunities to race for this sort of prize money, and I cannot help thinking that this race might have been the target for some time. 

He was among my tips on his reappearance, despite his long absence from the track, as I was thinking that the handicapper had been generous in dropping him in the weights. 

He ran very much as though the run was needed, and the market drift beforehand predicted it might be, and he was eventually pulled up. 

The selection is definitely well treated on some of his good placed form and with his stable having generally been in good form all season, and they have certainly going well recently, I am hoping he will have come on for his recent outing.

A couple of lightly-raced novices look set to dominate the market and, very possibly, the race for this closing handicap. 

I am sticking with the White/Hobbs team and hoping Oh My Johnny can see off the Dan Skelton-trained Honky Tonk Highway. This five-year-old fell at the last when set to win a point-to-point, and did the same in a novices' hurdle two starts ago. He also has a strong tendency to jump to his right. 

Sandown should help him in that respect, though, and he did show what he is capable of when winning easily at Uttoxeter last time out. I am hopeful that experience will curb his wayward tendencies and a rating of 116 looks very reasonable to begin his handicapping career.