Derby crowd up a thousand on last year - for no apparent reason!

ONE of the more surprising aspects of last Sunday’s Irish Derby at the Curragh was the size of the attendance.

The crowd was in excess of 24,000, up nearly a thousand on the year before, and such a highly respectable figure was somewhat difficult to understand.

It wasn’t as if there were any stars on show at the Curragh and you would have thought the absence of the Epsom Derby hero, Workforce, had to leave its mark. As well as that, it didn’t have the appearance of a Derby which was capable of grabbing the imagination of the public, with Ballydoyle plans, apparently, in a state of chaos on the lead-in to the race.