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Thats a very general statement to make Tony. You cant say GM has been leniantly handicapped in the 12.45
Top The Charts has an Irish rating of 119 Cavelino Rampante, but has somehow been given a mark of 117 by the English handicapper..
Cavelino Rampante…………Don`t get me wrong im a big layer at that price afterall the horse is hardly prolific,you need plenty of luck in such races and we see well hcapped horses getting turned every week!!
All the same he`s well h`capped………..no argument!!
Apologies Tony and TS your both correct.
Thats a very leniant mark…surprising really….
The ground is a lot softer over here in the Winter.
Soft ground….slippage……
Oh well, never mind….I don’t see why the UK handicapper can’t just give, say 7lb, to every Irish runner going over to the UK rather than having to rate every race himself.
CH,
It’s the inital rating that seems to me to be the main problem – it’s two totally different philosophies on how to treat winning novices.
Over here, a novice can be rated 125+ on the strength of a single in an ordinary novice hurdle.
In Ireland, novice winners, who have often beaten far more competitive fields, or at least bigger fields, are given a much lower mark that apparently is intended to make allowances for their lack of experience.
There’s also a chicken and egg situation – the Irish handicapper seems to allocate marks to fit in with the Irish race program, which has a lot of races for hurdlers below 120 and hardly any for those rated above that. Which came first – the low handicap marks, or the low rated races?
AP
Interesting to read in today’s Post that Noel O’Brien is changing the Irish weight-for-age scale to bring it more in line with the UK. Maybe we will see an end to the crazy two-system status quo in the next couple of years.
I thought it was interesting, too, carv.
However, no-one else seemed to agree when I posted about it a couple of days ago as I got zilch response!
Interesting to read in today’s Post that Noel O’Brien is changing the Irish weight-for-age scale to bring it more in line with the UK. Maybe we will see an end to the crazy two-system status quo in the next couple of years.
That’s welcome news for trainers and punters alike. The handicappers have needed their head’s banging together for a good few years now. Hopefully it’s a precursor to the end of the two seperate scales.
The situation at Cheltenham in particular was farcical where certain horses just seemed to assigned random marks by the British handicapper. Some horses were over a stone above their Irish marks whereas others would just be given two or three lbs.
The fact that Ninetieth Minute (the only Irish trained handicap winner excluding the cross country) was running off his Irish mark said a lot. Donn McClean made an interesting point at the time that if for example, American Trilogy had been Irish trained, there would have been uproar.
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