A Mug’s Game

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Next week we’ll see just how broke – or scared of spending their cash – people actually are when Cheltenham kicks off. I’ll be gambling some of the Irish Examiner’s money on at least one of the 4 days of the festival, so check out the paper for that amongst the generous supplements.

I failed big time last year in the same pursuit of quick money; as you can read below:

A SPEECHWRITER for one of the unsuccessful candidates in the race for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in America explained recently that a loser’s concession speech should be without both bad language and bitterness.

But f**k that, I was robbed yesterday.

A racing novice, I was entrusted with 50 to gamble as I wished yesterday — like a 1950s experiment where, in the name of science, monkeys are put in racing cars.

I joined the flood of punters crowding into Ladbrokes in Ballyvolane, on Cork city’s northside, before the curtain-raising Anglo Irish Bank Supreme Novices’ Hurdle at 2pm.

I was reminded of a scene depicted on David Attenbrough’s Life in Cold Blood on Sunday as dozens of crocodiles wait at a certain point in a river which only floods once a year allowing shoals of gullible mackerel to jump a high reef.

The smiling crocs lunch on the fish that literally leap into their waiting mouths. But the fish will try again next year. clutching my docket, drinking in the glow from the wall of colourful tv screens, I pondered the ones that got away.

I backed a long shot in The Gloves Are Off at a massive 40-1, mainly because Davy Russell, a namesake of my brother, was the jockey. This is about as analytical as the punting was about to get. But watching the action was like Hamlet without the prince, with TGAO not mentioned throughout, it seemed. Like my brother, a carpenter, he proved elusive when you needed him to do a job for you.

Living with class-mates in college, we had a telly we procured after it had spent a lifetime spent in a rural bookmaker’s office. It was put out to pasture in our humble Drumcondra sitting-room, with the words Stanley Racing burnt onto the screen.
Proof of the power of subliminal messaging: three of us developed debilitating gambling problems. Waiting for Match of the Day to start, we’d bet on the colour of Lineker’s tie.

Yesterday, despite my initial knock-back, I was filled with familiar urges and stuck 10 on Mahogany Blaze each way and another tenner on the much-touted Noland, who was to be steered by Ruby Walsh.

But as the Kaiser Chiefs said: Ruby, Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. More failure. The fancied Noland came in third while Mahogany Blaze was still running by the time I got home for a pink Snack and a cup of tea before the main feature, after what was merely the trailers.

I should have fast-forwarded. Sublimity had his name in lights after he won The Smurfit Champion Hurdle Challenge Trophy last year and yesterday I was banking on a Hollywood ending on his return. Sublimity: The Sequel. But once again my docket was to carpet the bookie’s floor as Robert Thornton scripted a dream win for Katchit.

And so I turned, in desperation, to the favourite in the 4.40 — named Wonderkid, ironically. At this stage though it was unfair to saddle him with my money. I was Midas in reverse, everything I touched was turning… but not to gold. My dream ticket, poor Wonderkid, had a nightmare.

When Con Houlihan described the Dublin goalkeeper Paddy Cullen as racing back to his line like “a woman who smelt a burning cake” after he was lobbed, he might have been talking about the desperate hoard who rushed the counter in Paddy Powers on Paul Street last evening. I was among them looking for conflagrant cupcakes and one last shot at redemption.

Second favourite River Liane then was to be my last chance saloon but with a miserable fiver flutter at 4-1 it wasn’t going to help me break even. I didn’t, but like political careers, all gamblers’ lives end in failure, right?