All-weather action at Lingfield and Southwell

With all jumps racing off, it is again left to the all-weather tracks to keep the action alive, and this afternoon we have racing from Lingfield and Southwell. Easily the best event is the listed race over 10 furlongs at 16.40 CET at Lingfield. Unfortunately there are only 5 runners, and strictly speaking, only two of them are listed class - Dansant (Ger Butler/ George Baker) and Suits Me (Tom Tate/ Micky Fenton). If form and ratings mean anything, then Dansant has to win this as he easily accounted for Suits Me over this CD before Christmas and is now only one pound worse off. The other 3 runners are all trained by Mick Channon, who is in good form, and the best of them is probably Rio Guru (Tony Culhane), but it requires quite a feat of the imagination to think that he can win here. On the undercard, German-bred Princess Flame (Brendan Powell/ Kylie Manser) can defy top-weight in the 1 mile 5 furlongs handicap at 17.10. She won 5 races last year, including twice over hurdl es, and goes well for this rider. At Southwell, the most interesting runner is Barney Curley´s Aviso (Andrew Stringer/ Tom Queally), who has top-weight in the mile handicap at 16.20. He has been well beaten in both his British starts, and the handicapper has reacted by dropping him to 85. He was rated 111 in Germany in 2007, wheh he won the Mehl-Mülhens-Rennen for Gestüt Schlenderhan, so if he could run to anywhere that form today, he could be expected to defeat this opposition, which is headed by Torch of Freedom (Sir Mark Prescott/ Stephen Donohoe) and McConnell (Gary Moore/ Fergus Sweeney). With this stable of course, one never knows, but they pulled off a similar feat last week with Tusculum and may well bring off the double today. Otherwise we expect Ingleby Arch (David Barron/ Tom Eaves) and Esprit de Corps (Kevin Ryan/ Neil Callan), both easy winners last week over this CD, to score again at 16.50 and 17.20 respectively.