General Sports uploaded (22/12) - Cheltenham Festival Week 8 & Race Previews uploaded - Andy Richmond’s Beating The Bias (17/12) uploaded - General Sports uploaded (15/12) - Cheltenham Festival Week 7 & Weekend Race Previews uploaded
3/10/22
Now that the Arc is done and dusted all members should have received an invitation to renew their subscription ahead of when the jumps racing starts up in earnest.
If you didn’t receive the email or are interested in signing up for my website for the first time then please get in touch and I’ll outline exactly what is in store up until the end of April as already previewed to an extent on the home page.
The big change within those invitations was the confirmation that after seven years of offering the All-Inclusive Service (a 12 months' service which also covered flat racing and sport) is that the website will be purely run as the Jumps Season Service from October 21st onwards which is being beefed up to include the Ante Post Focus, Big Race Trends and Beating The Bias columns which switch over from the All-Inclusive Service.
This is for a number of reasons. Firstly, as I get older I want more time for other things for a better work-life balance. Also as I get older I’ll admit that I am also starting to feel the pace a little in churning out so much content. If it comes to Roger Federer then it I suppose that it comes to us all! Far too much screen work which I want to scale back on.
In addition, and if I am being brutally honest, for a few seasons now I have gradually been losing some of my enthusiasm for flat racing. Whilst I have kept myself on top of the jumps racing scene in Britain and Ireland and retain my full passion for ‘the winter game’, it’s only really the elite level that catches my interest on the flat. There’s just way too much of it when I have so many other interests in the summer.
There are some elements of the sport coverage that I shall miss putting together but my Eurovision preview will still be written for the Attheraces website alongside big race trends for the major festivals on the flat so they can be followed on that portal. Outside of that I want to take a good break between May-mid October so that I am champing at the bit ahead of future jump racing seasons.
However, I will still give my views on big sporting events in the Thought of the Day on the home page throughout the jumps season (I’ll be all over the World Cup there) and doubtless some of the former contributors will give a fancy or two of their own too in their areas of expertise but not in full-column format. Therefore over the coming next few weeks some of the menu items in the right-hand column of the home page will start to drop off one by one.
Also dropping off will be my tweets letting Twitter followers know when the columns are uploaded as, with no general sport coverage from Oct 21 onwards, the uploads will follow a rigid, set format week after week so members will be fully aware of what columns will be uploaded when so there is no longer a requirement for any alerts.
So, onto the jumps and tomorrow I will upload my Big Race Trends for 20 of the biggest handicaps of the season starting with the Silver Trophy at Chepstow.
It’s then Champions Day coverage the following weekend - a meeting in which we have done really well in recent seasons for my final flat race previews of the year bar the best of The Breeders’ Cup and then it’s into the weekly weekend race jumps previews starting with the Cheltenham October (Showcase) Meeting and Old Roan Chase day at Aintree.
The weekly Cheltenham Festival columns will start four days later on Tuesday, October 25th and hopefully we can build on our LSP of 147 points since I started that service back in 2008.
As for the sport that we are covering up until October 21st, Mike Henderson is previewing all rounds of the World Grand Prix Darts that starts tonight. A brutal first round format this, with it being only best-of-three sets and a double-in to start and just eight seeds so there are plenty of high-profile matches which should mean plenty of drama and a fair few upsets over the first two days.
My final Football Column will be uploaded on Thursday outlining how the pre-season recommendations are going and looking for more bets. Like I mentioned earlier, I’ll be all over the World Cup though in Thought of the Day for that months’ worth of action.
Andy Richmond will be very busy this winter as in addition to his weekly NFL columns which are still available to anyone who wants them after October 21st, he’ll be finding new angles in his weekly Beating The Bias column, but for the jumps season for the first time so it will be interesting to see what he can come up with there.
For those interested in these Monthly Blogs, they will continue up to May before restarting in the autumn of 2023.
Finally I would like to thank all the sports contributors down the years for their many columns (Alan Potts, Ross Miles, Graham Wheldon, Paul Ferguson, Mark Ball, Jeremiah Catskill, Ciaran Meagher, George Weyham, Adam Hewson, Will Steele and Paul Matthew) and especially to Carl Redden, Mike Henderson, Paul Smith and Andy Richmond who have been with me from the outset.
