Poquelin tops Gold Cup possibles

Top-weight Poquelin heads the 32 five-day acceptors for Saturday’s Paddy Power Gold Cup at Cheltenham.

The eight-year-old was fifth in this valuable handicap chase 12 months ago and is one of three runners from Paul Nicholls’ stable.

The champion trainer has also left in ante-post favourite Mon Parrain and Aerial as he bids to win this prestigious contest for the first time.

Nicholls believes Mon Parrain has to improve to win such a competitive race and was pleased to get a racecourse gallop into the five-year-old at Exeter last week.

“He worked great at Exeter a couple of days ago – I had been struggling to get him as fit as I would have liked, so that’s why we took him there and he worked nicely,” Nicholls told the Racing UK Podcast.

“He’s going to have to improve to win off a mark of 152. He’s been a bit of a hype horse. ”He won so well when he was thrown in at the weights at Sandown and then he did run well at Aintree, although he has gone up a few pounds for getting beat.

“I’ve not won the race before as generally mine are not well handicapped. It’s going to be a hard race to win, but he doesn’t know he’s favourite.”

All the leading fancies stood their ground, including the Philip Hobbs-trained Wishfull Thinking, Ferdy Murphy’s Divers, David Pipe’s Great Endeavour, David Bridgwater’s The Giant Bolster and Nicky Richards’ Noble Alan.

Nigel Twiston-Davies, who has won the race twice in the last three years with Imperial Commander (2008) and Little Josh last year, is double-handed with Swincombe Rock and Billy Magern.

There are four Irish possibles in Paul Nolan’s Noble Prince, Henry de Bromhead’s Loosen My Load, Tom Taaffe’s Finger Onthe Pulse and Eoin Griffin’s Norther Bay.