Jamie Lynch: Cue Wants To Be A Millionaire?

Who wants to be a millionaire? Cue Card does. Cue Card already is, after eight seasons’ hard work, but so too was Chris Tarrant long before the eighth season of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and he did sixteen series in total.

Chris Tarrant is a regular at the Cheltenham Festival, where he might have bumped into John McCririck, who, in 2007, was colourfully ejected from Alan Titchmarsh’s colourless chat show for saying to Tarrant's estranged wife, Ingrid: ‘You must be terrible in bed for Chris to leave you.’

Projection is a word that springs to mind. A transfer of our own unconscious anxiety or behaviour onto others.

Projection – of a different sort - is a word that springs to mind for Thistlecrack, when assessing his chance, and his price, in relation to Cue Card, in a Christmas Carol of a King George, where the Ghost of Christmas Future has more bearing on the present than the past. But the past mirrors the present in the Triple Crown version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, a one-player game after the fastest pinger first round of the Betfair Chase, and it’s the same player as last season, when he was just three fences away from folklore fame and freakish fortune.

The reason Cue Card is in the millionaire chair again is because he’s so good at answering questions. He hasn’t made a career out of it, but his career has been itemised by it. Cue question. Cue answer. Cue Card.

Was it a fluke? Has he stalled? Can he jump? Can he breathe? Two-miler? Three-miler? Has age caught up? Have others caught up? All answered, all answered in the affirmative, and all his own work. Mostly his own work, anyway, with a little expert help to put him right every now and then by Paddy Brennan, the Diana Ingram to Cue Card’s Major Charles. And then, obviously, there’s the top management team to consider, comprising Tizzard Snr and Jnr, Joe knowing the horse like nobody else. Moulding Cue Card into the monster he’s become couldn’t have been done by just any Tom, Dick or Harry, or Dan, Nick or Harry.     

We’ll delve more into Cue Card, and the nuances of the team-mate tear-up in the King George, during the Christmas game inspired by the chasing of the £1m Chasing Triple Crown by Cue Card in a racing version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, looking back at some of the hot topics of 2016 and looking ahead to the Kempton festive feast.

You’re in the hotseat, set to feel the pressure like Thistlecrack, with a set of questions that get progressively harder, but remember your three racing-related lifelines: you’ve got a 50/50 option called even-money, though it’s 9/4 on the exchanges, you can phone Martin Dwyer, or you can #AskBlogger. So strap yourself in and see how far you go…

At least we’ve got the Stayers’ Hurdle back to its fit and proper title. The ABP policy was always a game of risk, reliant upon the interest of outside sponsors or the principles, such as they are, of bookmakers, neither of which has been pierced sufficiently to do what was intended.

A teacher rolls their eyes in the playground when the squabbling kids run to them to sort out a mess. The Government is racing’s teacher.

It goes against the grain because we’re all supposed to love it at this time of the year, but I’ve always found It’s A Wonderful Life painfully slow and plodding. Nothing, though, is as painfully slow and plodding as Andy Thornton’s march to 1000 winners, and we’re all going to embrace him and each other when it eventually happens at some stage in 2017, only two away after Thursday’s inspiring win aboard 28/1-shot Barton Gift, which showed that he’s as hungry as ever, and as stylish. In the words of the whole of Wimbledon, come on Andy.

With Thistlecrack otherwise engaged, the Kauto Star Novices Chase looks a winnable Grade 1, and Anibale Fly might already have won one, had he got going slightly sooner in the Drinmore. But it confirmed that he’s a chaser going places, and it suggested that three miles could help him get there. The make and shape of the race must increase the temptation for Tony Martin to bring over Anibale Fly, by far the most interesting horse in a substandard field.

Enough drollery, let’s move to the meaningful matter of the King George, and the key components to this delicious duel. As mentioned earlier, Cue Card has a reputation for coming up with the answers, but this time he’s the one asking the questions, and, for Thistlecrack, it’s not like Question Time where they know what’s coming days in advance and it doesn’t really matter what they say, as this will be a real-time, make-or-break interrogation.

The challenge is set, and so is the standard:

If this was Mastermind rather than Millionaire, Cue Card’s specialist subject would be big ratings in big races. It’s notable news (to us at least) when a horse runs to a top-class figure of 170 or more. The greats may do it four or five times in their career; the giants six or seven. Cue Card has done it ten times.

On three of those ten occasions he’s cracked the colossal club by penetrating the 180 barrier, including his latest start in the Betfair Chase when he made Gold Cup winner Coneygree look slow and second-rate. With his record and reliability, it’s odds on that Cue Card will run to a rating in the 170s in the King George, and 180 isn’t much odds against, given what he did at Haydock only last month.

All of which brings us to the final, fateful question.

Denman, Vautour, Azertyuiop and Cue Card’s plush plaything Coneygree were four novices that hit the heights of 170+ early in their chasing career, but only one, the one and only Sprinter Sacre, had Russ Bray clearing his clogged throat.

In Thistlecrack’s favour, there’s always an element of Schrödinger's horse with novices, in races for novices. Just because a horse doesn’t run to 180 doesn’t mean it’s not a 180 horse. It could be completely unextended, it could be beating something that only the fullness of time reveals its true value, or it could be running in the fog at Haydock.

Thistlecrack hasn’t been masked by fog nor indiscernible rivals so far in his chase career, but the gear has been clear, barely out of second, and the £1m question is what will he do with something to push him. A Timeform mantra is that running to big ratings is as much about opportunity as ability. On Boxing Day, Cue Card is his nemesis, but also his opportunity.

Sprinter Sacre managed a monstrous 184 in his fourth chase, the Arkle, because he was Sprinter Sacre, and because he had a formidable foe that day, a giant’s shoulders to stand on, exactly the same giant shoulders that Thistlecrack has to clamber over, big and broad and belonging to Cue Card.

It’s easy to back Thistlecrack in the King George. It’s easy to envisage him powering ahead on the run-in if he’s held his nerve and his position. But the point of this game, if there is one, is to highlight that it’s going to be incredibly hard, and it would be incredibly rare, for Thistlecrack to jump so high so soon to the distinguished domain where Cue Card has a reserved parking space.

It’s a heavyweight head-to-head. And the head says the scales are heavily weighted in Cue Card’s favour.