Fairyhouse Easter meeting ends

Today is the third and final day of the Fairyhouse Easter Meeting, but unfortunately the main event, the Grade Two Norman Grove Chase over an extended 2 miles at 16.55 CET has cut up badly. Only 3 runners face the starter, Twinlight (Willie Mullins/ Ruby Walsh), Mallowney (Tom Doyle/ Paul Carberry) and Savello (Tony Martin/ Bryan Cooper). All 3 are well up this grade, but Mallowney is best in at the weights and also holds Twinlight on Naas form, while he won easily over this CD before that, so is the obvious choice. From the betting point of view, the two handicap hurdles that follow are more interesting, over 3 miles for novices at 17.25 and over 2 miles half an hour later. Both look wide open and are almost certainly AP McCoy´s last ever rides in Ireland. Obviously it would be nice for him to go out on a winner, and we think his best chance is in the earlier race on Eoin Griffin´s Rathpatrick, who is quite drastically in distance - this may be what he needs. In the 2 mile race he rides top weight Thomas Edison for Tony Martin, and it would be amazing if this wins on his first outing since taking a similar race at Galway last July. We can easily prefer the owner´s Draco (Aidan and Joseph O´Brien), but there is very little between this one and Pink Coat (Sandra Hughes/ Luke Dempsey) and Pairofbrowneyes (Liz Doyle/ Shane Flanagan) on their running at Leopardstown in January.

There is no jumping in Britain today, just low level all-weather racing at Lingfield and Chelmsford - with very small fields at both tracks- and turf racing at Pontefract. The best race by far is the 10 furlongs handicap there at 17.00. Astroneus (Amanda Perrett/ Pat Dobbs) - a half-brother by Sea The Stars to French Derby winner and top sire Le Havre- is the favourite here, but we shall take a chance on front-runner Master of Finance (Mark Johnston/ Silvestre de Sousa), third in last year´s Swiss Derby and well handicapped on that form.