Tuesday saw us return to Southwell with The Firm, only 12 days after his last successful run there, and once again Rob Hornby took the ride in the mile handicap. The Firm was Rob’s only ride of the day and he had travelled up with his boss, Andrew Balding, who was running the hot favourite in our race, Berkshire Beauty, ridden by Oisin Murphy. Although the favourite had won well on its last start, it hadn’t shown much before that and as the race developed it couldn’t land a blow. In contrast, The Firm ran another cracking race and managed to overcome some traffic problems when it appeared his gap had closed a furlong out, with Rob Hornby keeping a cool head and switching inside. He kept The Firm up to his work to take the lead close home and land our second win from three runs at the track.

The Firm has given us our second win of 2016 from three runs, and was the 10th winner of the year for trainer Daniel Mark Loughnane. He has had a blistering start to 2016 and we are very pleased that all his hard work is paying off.

It was a bit disappointing after The Firm’s success to hear the commentators on At The Races focus on talking about the failure of the favourite, which it sounded like they had backed, rather than discussing the great run from our lad! The Firm went off at 10/1 and some connections were on at much bigger prices, so at least we had a nice profit to stop us from being too offended!