Sandown abandoned

Tomorrow’s meeting at Sandown has been abandoned due to a frozen track.

Clerk of the course Andrew Cooper inspected the track at 8am and was forced to call off the meeting, which was due to feature Champion Hurdle hopeful Binocular amongst others.

Cooper and his team had covered the track earlier in the week to give the meeting every chance of going ahead.

However, the covers failed to beat a series of cold nights and Cooper admitted it had not been too tough a decision to call off the fixture.

He said: “It’s obviously disappointing but I think, to be fair, we probably knew it was going to be an uphill battle at the close of play yesterday.

“It dropped to minus 4C here overnight, but the wind chill has also dropped, so in a way it’s not really any worse than it was yesterday.

“We are frozen in places, despite the covers being down, and it was a relatively straightforward decision.

“We’re expecting to go up to 2C today but it won’t be enough. From where were are now, we need to be hitting 5C or 6C in this time scale.”