Cheltenham Preview: Northern Dreams

The North and South have a love/hate relationship. Southerners love themselves and northerners hate them for it.

Trust British humour to refine and define the north-south divide, its crude and rude generalisations hitting on a fundamental frontier of the issue, one of sensibilities as much as sense. It’s not a self-fulfilling prophecy as such, but it can be prophetic self-vision.

A supposed split in Britain, but a certain split in Britain’s racing codes, talk of a north-south divide rarely heard on the Flat this year, because the likes of Johnston, Fahey, O’Meara and Burke amongst others have erased boundaries by pushing boundaries, changing the base argument.

Over jumps, over time, the geographical identity has intensified, or so it seems, to the extent that the north now has a clear sense of being different, in opposition, almost like an imagined community, the product of traditions and assumptions, something which is a state of mind as much as a place. And that, I think, is at the heart of Donald McCain’s comment-cum-rallying cry, on the Jockey Club’s Love The Jumps Podcast, when admitting to getting ‘slightly frustrated’ with some of his fellow northern trainers.

It’s obvious that there’s a south-slanting imbalance and inequality in the distribution of National Hunt power, but the north isn’t powerless to address and even redress it. Acceptance doesn’t mean resignation, and northern notice is being served by the Grand National, jumps’ biggest prize, won by McCain in 2011, by Sue Smith in 2013 and, from further up, in Nicola’s north, by Lucinda Russell last year.

Speaking up, speaking truth, McCain may be the voice of a revolution, but other quieter cogs still turn, as they always have, for all the end of an era was marked this week with the funeral of Mary Reveley, a pioneer in many ways, including her unofficial role for a time as unassuming ambassador for the north. One of her greatest works was Function Dream, who she inherited in the autumn of 2000 and, by the spring of 2001, had won six of seven starts, culminating with the Victor Chandler and Game Spirit.

The foot and mouth outbreak robbed Function Dream of her shot at the Champion Chase, rerouted to a valuable handicap staged that week at Huntingdon, where she didn’t fire under a big weight, the second-last race for her, and the final one for Tullymurry Toff, a northern stalwart for another northern stalwart in the Reveley mould, Malcolm Jefferson.

Tullymurry Toff won the two-and-a-half-mile novice chase at the upcoming Cheltenham meeting back in 2007. Twenty years on, now the North’s shining light, Jefferson is firing a bigger and better long-range missile at this fixture, though the guidance system went slightly awry at the programming stage.   

From one Dream to another, and while Function’s Cheltenham Dream was scuppered by foot and mouth, it’s more foot in mouth that’s preventing Cloudy Dream from contesting the BetVictor Gold Cup, due to a clerical error, but it’s no more than destiny delayed, and perhaps only by 24 hrs, for the Shloer Chase. Missing out on a Gold Cup, before a chance to set the record straight over two miles at Cheltenham, it sounds like a page out of the One Man biography, one of the last great greys to fly the flag for the north.

Cloudy Dream is still working his way up, but besides his skin there are shades of One Man about him, something of a bridle monster, more of a glider than a grinder, and, by dint of fate, the Shloer could just be his perfect playground. It’s a big job for the man on top, Brian Hughes, but the story is about the man behind him, Malcolm Jefferson, for his fuelling work in keeping northern fires burning. It was a baton passed between him and Reveley, and now to him from Reveley, directly so in the case of the other huge hope for the north, Waiting Patiently, who remains unbeaten for Jefferson, after the groundwork was done by Mary’s son Keith. Altior’s absence paves a way for Waiting Patiently in the Tingle Creek in a few weeks.

John Quinn and Brian Ellison may represent the north in the feature handicap hurdle on Sunday, the Greatwood, but neither Project Bluebook nor Nietzsche is so interesting as the Dan Skelton-trained Mohaayed, whose mark of 137 puts him in that super-sweet spot in an unorthodox handicap with The New One compressing the weights so much. It means that Mohaayed carries just 10-0, while still being in the handicap proper, not marginally out of it as he was when a fine third in the Scottish Champion Hurdle, in which he did best of those held up. He’ll be fine-tuned for this, as North Hill Harvey was in this race for the Skeltons in 2016.