All-weather racing at Southwell and Kempton

There is now certain to be no jumps racing until Boxing Day at the earliest, but there are still opportunities for N.H. horses as Kempton today stages a new card comprised entirely of races for N.H, performers, so-called "jumpers bumpers". And they have attracted a very strong entry, with leading trainers Paul Nicholls and Nicky Henderson in particular having fancied runners in most of the races.

In fact it would be no surprise to see this pair between them take all 7 races. Our fancies are Journeyman (Henderson/ Tony McCoy) at 13.50 CET, Dark Lover (Nicholls/ Noel Fehily) at 14.20, Vertige Dore (Nicholls/ Timmy Murphy) at 14.50, Giorgio Quercus (Henderson/ McCoy) at 15.20, Eradicate (Henderson/ David Bass) at 15.50, Working Title (Henderson/ NcCoy) at 16.20 and Pepe Simi (Nicholls/ Sam Thomas) at 16.50. However we would not go overboard on these selections, as all the races look quite competitive and racing on the all-weather is an unknown quantity for most of these runners.

At least there are some good runners engaged at Kempton. At Southwell on the other hand it is the usual all-weather mixture of poor and very poor. Dandy Nicholls has his string in good form and has an excellent record here. He can land a double with the lightly-raced Xilerator (Matt O´Connell), who has top-weight Nazreef (Hughie Morrison/ Travis Block) to beat in the mile handicap at 15.05, in what is easily the best race here, and Spirit of Dixie (Marc Geran) in the second division of the 5 furlongs handicap at 14.05. Yossi (Richard Guest/ Sean Palmer) has been runner-up 4 times running over this CD and can finally get his head in front in the 1 1/2 mile handicap at 16.35; Kumbeshwar (David Evans/ Matthew Cosham) is the form choice here, but has a huge weight to shoulder.