‘The fact that I’ve kept faith with Brian tells its own story’
Many felt the horse only had to turn up to win, but he did not and left the punters’ pockets scorched and the layers’ satchels bulging.
Twelve months on and Fenton is able to dissect Dunguib’s failure in forensic detail, but the results of his post mortem, oddly, do not leave him grieving the ‘what-might-have-beens.’ Rather they leave the former champion amateur jockey with a case of the ‘what-might-yet-happens.’
The trainer is very matter-of-fact about the Supreme Novices’ defeat — as he is about the subsequent failure of the horse to make amends in the Rabobank Champion Hurdle, but it has not dimmed his enthusiasm for his stable star.
“This time last year, we were very hyped up,” he reflects. “We thought we had the bees-knees, but on the day, things didn’t go in our favour. First of all, the gallop was not as strong as it normally is and he likes to come off a strong pace. In the race, we probably found ourselves a little further back than we wanted to be and the thing is that those good horses don’t come back to you in those circumstances — especially on nice ground.
“So the thing was he had to go and chase it and he just couldn’t get to Menorah and Get Me Out Of Here in front of him.”
Fenton is insistent that while the weight of expectation among the Irish about Dunguib was certainly huge, it did not have any effect on the outcome — “absolutely not”, he stresses. “That did not bother us one way or the other; that part of it we were able to handle. The punters were not the only ones with high expectations. We had high expectations ourselves, but that’s racing for you.”
Coping with defeat was one thing, but coping with a vituperative post-race attack on jockey Brian O’Connell by racing pundit John McCririck, who maintained the ride O’Connell gave the horse was a disgrace and should have resulted in some sort of ban, was an unnecessary diversion from the real tale. And, as a former jockey himself, Fenton understands the circumstances that led O’Connell being blamed for the horse’s defeat.
“The whole McCririck thing was just about creating controversy — that’s all it was,” he maintains, adding: “The fact of the matter is that Brian knows himself exactly what went wrong without me having to tell him. He understands himself now that if he had a chance to ride the race again, I’m sure he’d do it differently. The fact that I’ve kept faith with Brian, I think, tells its own story. You have to take these things on the chin really. When you have a hot favourite going to Cheltenham, there are high expectations and you’re only hoping everything runs smoothly, but it doesn’t always work that way.
“I’m sure the fact that Brian was a little wide down the back straight and turning down the hill didn’t help. He was actually pushed a little bit wider off the bend turning into the straight but it was not his fault. Funny enough, the last hurdle is much closer to the winning post now than it used to be in previous years. That meant Brian could not fully utilise Dunguib’s finishing and he was not able to get the most out of him coming up that hill.”
As if the Cheltenham defeat was not bad enough, Dunguib failed to ignite subsequently at Punchestown, but again Fenton feels he now knows why.
“In actual fact I possibly had him very fresh for Punchestown because we had given him a good break after Cheltenham and he was extremely fresh going there and maybe in the first mile he expended too much energy. He ran way too free,” he says.
Several bitter lessons learned, the connections licked their wounds and considered what to do next and decided that maybe the best option for the coming campaign was to recognise that the second half of the season was more important than the first half. “Having set out our stall in this regard,” Fenton maintains, “we decided that he would be left out in the field a lot longer than we had done in the past before bringing him in, and getting him back into training, and it was our aim that his first run would be on January 12 in the Johnstown Hurdle. It didn’t work out that way though.
“First of all we were held up with the bad weather and while we missed the original date for him to return, we were still game ball to go for the BHP Irish Champion Hurdle, but it turned out that his blood was not as good as it should have been and for that reason we decided he’d only run when he was as healthy as he possibly could be.”
Unfortunately this meant that the disrupted preparation for a tilt at the Champion Hurdle proper was pretty unsatisfactory, as Fenton readily admits.
“Listen, I’d obviously prefer if he was going to Cheltenham with two runs under his belt, but there was simply not the time between his winning reappearance at Gowran and the festival to do that. It would not have been right for the horse to have had a second run after Gowran and before Cheltenham. It would not have been practicable.
“So, we are left in a situation that we have what we have and we have to do our best with — but the bottom line is that we’re very happy with the horse, he seems to be in good form and has come out of the Gowran race in excellent shape. I actually think he has really blossomed since and he has really come to himself.”
Fenton says he has not been hard on the horse since Gowran, getting only two serious pieces of work into Dunguib prior to sending him to Cheltenham for tomorrow’s Champion Hurdle.
“He does not take an awful lot of work to get him ready and you could very easily do too much and he’d be over the top, so we’ve had to watch that.”
Dunguib is something of a quirky character — his notorious box walking antics would have put off many a handler. “He likes his routine and he is always out in the first lot at home before being turned out into a field for a bit of a frolic and maybe a roll — whatever takes his fancy. That routine was upset a little by the weather over the winter, but he has coped okay. He still walks his box, but that’s just the way he is.
“Before Gowran it was well documented that he was under something of a cloud, but he jumped well enough at the outset and when he got settled and relaxed and when the pressure came on, his jumping was slick and fast. That was exactly what we wanted. What we didn’t want was for Luska Lad to jump out and go like the clappers. If that happened, we might have been licking our wounds, regardless of the result — even if we had won, we might have had a horse which was feeling the effects of a race which had left its mark on him. But the fact that they didn’t go mad and the race was sensibly run, was probably a big help to him.
“We are aware of the task that’s in front of us and we would not be sending him there if we thought the result was cut and dried before we even started. From the outside looking in, we feel like we have some chance and we deserve our place in the race. He has blossomed since Gowran and his blood is back to where it should be — it is excellent right now — and the bit of sunshine in recent weeks has been a help too.
“The next stepping stone is a major one, but as I say, we’ll all be wiser afterwards.
“We have massive belief in this horse and we always have had, but he will have to up his game and I am hopeful he will rise to the occasion.”
