GOLD CUP PREVIEW:REVENGE IS a dish supposedly best served cold and with rotten weather conditions predicted for today's Punchestown's second day festival feature, Rubi Light could be one of the few to relish everything cold and wet in the Tote Gold Cup.
Certainly very testing ground will be no trouble to Rob Hennessy’s stable star when he lines up for the €140,000 highlight, so much so that even slight stamina doubts regarding the three-mile trip don’t really come into play.
But quite a few snippy critics might have to tuck into quite an amount of crow should Rubi Light emerge best of a 10-runner field that also includes the Hennessy winner Quel Esprit and a pair of cross-channel raiders headed by Captain Chris.
It was the presence of another cross-channel horse that provoked widespread dismissal of last Christmas’s Lexus Chase form as Rubi Light struggled home a well-beaten second at Leopardstown in his first attempt at three miles.
Flippant disparagement of the merits of Ireland’s staying chasers now looks miles offside since the horse that won the Lexus was none other than the ill-fated Synchronised who only went and won the Gold Cup at Cheltenham afterwards.
In fairness it wasn’t just those whose first instinct is towards flippancy that got it wrong. Even Tony McCoy, who rides Quantitativeasing today, said at the time that neither Long Run nor Kauto Star would be unduly worrying themselves about the Leopardstown form. Time proved everyone wrong. Rubi Light subsequently won easily at Gowran but looked ill at ease on much better ground at Cheltenham in the Ryanair when Captain Chris finished ahead of him.
That was much more like the Captain Chris of last year when he was a top novice, and indeed in last December’s King George when he ran third to Kauto Star and Long Run. What’s different now, though, is the going.
“He’s in particularly good form and had the ground been good I’d have really fancied him,” Captain Chris’s trainer Philip Hobbs admitted yesterday.
Quite a few of these should be able to cope with ground that is expected to soften even further with up to an inch of rain forecast for later today.
Quel Esprit, for instance, who missed Cheltenham when under par on the eve of the Gold Cup, should be fine on it.
Others, however, won’t be, including probably last year’s winner Follow The Plan, a good winner at Liverpool, and bidding to join Neptune Collonges (2007-08) as a back-to-back winner of this race. But Rubi Light will relish it.
“We’re ready to rock,” said Rob Hennessy yesterday. “I was doing a rain dance last week, but I think I maybe overdid it a bit. It’s a dreadful forecast but the softer the better for us.”
The Ratoath-based trainer added: “The only time he’s been three miles before was when he was second to Synchronised in the Lexus – and that isn’t looking bad form now.”
