Paul Townend: the inside track on my Thursday rides at Cheltenham

It’s St Patrick’s Thursday at Cheltenham on Thursday, so we’ll be hoping we have the luck of the Irish on our side! It’s another very competitive day of racing, but we have some live chances throughout the afternoon, so hopefully it’ll be another successful day for us.

We start off with Bambino Fever and she was so good here last year when winning the Champion Bumper, so hopefully she can make it 2-2 at Cheltenham here. She bumped into a good mare at Naas in December in the shape of Oldschool Outlaw, and she reopposes again, so I’d have enormous respect for her, but Bambino took a big step forward from that when winning impressively at Fairyhouse the following month, so I’d be very hopeful we can turn the tables with Gordon’s mare.

It won’t be straightforward for Bambino Fever, and I’d say we have other nice mares in the race. I love Future Prospect, and I think she’s a very good mare, but I’d just be a bit worried about how she might handle the preliminaries at Cheltenham. If she does things right, I could see her running a big race, but she’s a fine big mare, and I’d say she’s one to keep onside going forward.

It’s then onto another lovely mare in the shape of Jade De Grugy who returns to the smaller obstacles in the Mares’ Hurdle (14:40). It’s a smaller field than has been the case in recent years, but it’s a decent race, and although Wodhooh is a short price, she might not have it all her own way. It’s never easy coming back from chasing in a race of this quality, but she’s schooled well back over hurdles at home, and she has some very classy form to her name, so I’d say she has a chance of upsetting the favourite.

I have enormous respect for Wodhooh as she just seems to always get the job done, and Feet Of A Dancer of Paul Nolan’s is another mare I’d be taking very seriously, but I’d be disappointed if Jade De Grugy isn’t in the shakeup at the very least.

We’re then looking forward to running Ballyburn in the Stayers’ Hurdle (15:20), and I think he’s a bit of a forgotten horse in this. He’ll have to do everything right if he’s going to win, but we know the ability is there with him, it’s just a case of channelling it in the right way. He’ll have the hood on him for the first time, so I do think that will be a help to him, so although he did underperform at Leopardstown over Christmas, it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if he left that run behind him. I suppose my other concern would just be whether he’ll stay three miles strongly enough to power up that hill, but I haven’t lost faith in the horse yet, so I’m looking forward to seeing how he gets on.

You’d say Teahupoo is the one we’ll all have to beat, but Bob Ollinger was very good last year, and the Skelton’s horse Kabral Du Mathan brings a lot of potential to the race, so it’s another very open race.

I then conclude the day in the Ryanair (16:00) with a horse that’s been very good to me in Impaire Et Passe, and he’s probably a horse that doesn’t get the credit he deserves. He was so good here over hurdles a few years ago, so he’s proven he can handle the occasion, so he shouldn’t be phased by the hustle and bustle off the festival. He was brilliant the last day at Gowran Park, and he got me out of trouble a fair bit that day, so that’s another reason I’m a big fan of his.

You should never be afraid of one horse, but Fact To File looks a bit of a monster, so we’ll probably need him to underperform to give us a winning chance, but if you were to take him out of the race, then I’d say we’d have as good a chance of anybody.