I said last week that I was a bit worried if the ground got heavy at Sandown on Saturday for Lalor and, unfortunately, that was the case.

We had the same issue at Newbury in February. He just doesn’t like it heavy, but he’s absolutely fine and is having a quiet week now.

Dickie [Richard Johnson] was very positive that it was some more decent experience for him. On the whole he jumped well, apart from being slow at the third.

We were pleased that he had some experience jumping off the bridle and it was good that he jumped well when under pressure, as he’ll need to do that later in the season.

There really aren’t many options in the two-mile novice chase division.

In an ideal world we would have liked to have given him more than just under three weeks before runs, but we now have plenty of time until the Lightning Novices’ Chase at Doncaster at the end of January.

There’s also a nice gap between that race and Cheltenham, so we’ll be hoping the ground isn’t too bad and he can bounce back to last month’s form.

We know he’s a very good horse and, although Saturday was a mild setback, it’s all part of the learning curve and his main targets are in the spring.

He’s going to be on babysitting duty this week, Bella has been showing him some of the Christmas presents that people have been kindly sending her!

Nice point-to-point double at Wadebridge

It was great to have our first point-to-point double under Neil McLean’s name on Sunday at Wadebridge.

He has taken over the running of our point-to-pointers and hopefully it’s the first of many!

Dragon De La Tour and Shelcomeonfordrun were both excellent and we’re looking forward to the future with both of them.

Shelcomeonfordrun got the job done nicely and I may in fact bring her over to my yard for a mares’ maiden hurdle.

I’ve had my eye on her for a while now, as she works very well at home and she’ll have learnt plenty from that point-to-point run.

It’s going to be a quiet week for the yard this week, but we’ll then have a few out next week before Christmas.

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