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I appreciate clerks of the course have a difficult job and the Irish racing authorities wanted to do as much as they could to get the meeting on. However, could this situation have been handled better?
All week the mood music was “cautious optimism” and “it should be raceable”. Then it gets abandoned around 8am on Saturday, which suggests the ground was nowhere near raceable.
I have seen comments online from people who live in the Dublin area who say there was no chance of racing, given the state of the ground and the fact it was raining heavily on Friday night. For a meeting to be abandoned in Ireland, the ground must be like a quagmire.
I feel sorry for anyone who has travelled over from the UK. I expect most will have travelled last night, so an early abandonment to stop them travelling probably wasn’t realistic. And they wouldn’t get their money back on flights or hotels anyway.
It looks like the only winners here are going to be Dublin’s pubs! Let’s hope tomorrow is on – but the ground must be desperate.
At least the Saturday card has been saved for Monday – but it won’t be quite the same and is not much use to anyone with a Sunday evening or Monday morning flight.
I’m disappointed as I was looking forward to it so much but pleased that it isn’t going to be run on bottomless ground [first thing I though of when I woke up this morning and consulted google as soon as possible]. And, being retired I can listen to it on racing radio on Monday. But I agree, I didn’t see how racing could possibly have gone ahead today. Had it been in England I could have understood the course being desperate to save the card but it seems strange in Ireland given that they seem to have far more flexibility when it comes to running the card on a different day.
I would only have been able to watch the first two or three races today, so from a purely selfish point of view it actually suits me to have the meeting moved to Monday afternoon. But that is obviously not important.
The issue I have is the public statements seemed to suggest the meeting was more likely to be on than off, whereas the comments I have read online suggest it was always more likely to be off than on.
I started to have my doubts when watching RTV last night. I got the impression Fran Berry and Kevin O’Ryan were feeling a bit pessimistic about it going ahead.
Unraceable on the hurdles track yesterday morning it was inevitable it would be abandoned I didn’t even bother looking at the races for the DRF competition. Pictures from the track over the last few days suggested it would be fine for the ducks.
The more I know the less I understand.
CAS,
I think they were rather unlucky. I was looking at the weather radar yesterday and they had an area of heavy/torrential rain centered over the Dublin area for two to three hours late afternoon/early evening. Twenty miles away, no rain at all. Not the sort of thing that can be forecast or predicted.
Leopardstown drains fast and if last night’s weather system had passed about 20 miles further south they would probably have been ok. There’s one of the more typical bands of rain forecast early tomorrow morning but it looks fairly light and should be across and gone quickly.
“I think they were rather unlucky”.
Maybe, maybe not. You would soon go poor if you bet on weather forecasts being accurate.
As RTB says, it was very optimistic to say racing would probably be on based on the pictures yesterday. I still believe even their “cautious optmism” was a little less cautious than it should have been.
To be fair they have communicated really well this week. There wasn’t anything significant on the radar after Storm Chandra and the track was raceable Wednesday. There was every reason to be optimistic. Then this other system pops up and they warned the public any significant rainfall would be a sting in the tail.
The problem is that it wasn’t definitely going to hit them, it was a twirly whirly weather platter skirting the edge of Ireland and buggering off again.
The track was raceable again Friday afternoon, it would be very silly to abandon Saturday at that point and then only get a mil or two overnight.But I understand what you’re saying about cautious optimism. I heard that a couple of times but then I also heard ‘not looking good’ etc. Maybe they could have been more realistically negative. A bit more ‘No Fekkin Chance Like’.
I see it’s the usual cheap rerun drivel on both ITV3 and ITV4 on Monday – would be nice if they made an effort to try to get the rescheduled meeting live on one of those channels.
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