British jump fixtures face morning inspections

Tomorrow’s jump meetings at Sandown Park and Newcastle both hinge on morning inspections.

Officials at Sandown, where the main event is the £45,000 (€64,000) ladbrokes.com Tolworth Hurdle, have called a precautionary inspection for 7.30am.

Clerk of the course Andrew Cooper said: “We’re absolutely fine at the moment and we would be on Sunday, but there is a very sharp frost forecast for tonight.

“It’s already turning into a coldish day here and the air temperatures are forecast to be below freezing for a long period of the night, and struggling to get to plus three or four during the course of tomorrow morning.

“We’re perfectly raceable as it stands, there’s no frost or anything like that, but it sounds sufficiently bad that we should have a look in the morning.

“If we got the worst-case scenario in terms of the forecast, then it would be a concern.

“Apparently it could still be below freezing at 10am tomorrow, although the forecasters were about four degrees out with the temperature last night.

“We’ll have to see, but they do seem to be pretty confident about what is going to happen tonight, I have to say.”

The going on the hurdles course is good to soft, soft in places, with the chase track good to soft, good in places.

Prospects at Newcastle, where the £40,000 (€57,000) Cantor Mobile ‘Dipper’ Novices’ Chase is the main event, are described as “50-50”.

After checking the track at noon today, clerk of the course James Armstrong said: “We are going to have another look tomorrow at 7.30am. Things are improving all the while, but we still wouldn’t be able to race at this moment.

“Prospects are 50-50. The forecast is to hover around zero, with the worst-case scenario for it to go down to minus one, and there is talk of some light snow, although hopefully that shouldn’t cause us a problem.

“If it stays mild tonight we’ve got a chance, but if it dips much below zero we’ll have problems.”

Conditions at Gosforth Park are described as good to soft, soft in places, and partly frozen.

There are no reported problems for tomorrow’s all-weather cards at Lingfield and Wolverhampton.

Given the expected frost and inspections, should racing be abandoned Channel 4 will broadcast from the all-weather meetings. Race times will be confirmed on The Morning Line.

Officials at Plumpton on Sunday are “very confident” that racing will go ahead as planned.

Clerk of the course Geoff Stickels said: “We’ve got a bit of heavy ground, but there are no problems at all.

“We are expecting a frost tonight, but not much of a frost the following night. So I’m very confident of racing.”

Sunday’s other scheduled meeting, on the Southwell all-weather track, looks set to go ahead.

The New Year’s Day meeting at the Nottinghamshire venue was called off when the track became unraceable after heavy rain fell on ground which had been extensively worked because of frost, making the surface unstable.

However, David Williams, estate manager at Southwell, said: “At the moment we don’t anticipate any problems.”

Today’s fixture at Ayr was abandoned due to frost after temperatures dipped to minus five in the early hours of this morning, taking the total number of jump meetings lost to the weather this season to 15.