Hexham disappointment and VERY quiet week ahead

NOSAM didn't take his chance in the end, so it was left to BILL'S ECHO and DAN DE LION to try to add to Richard Guest's score for the season. Alas, Bill's Echo lasted just four fences before giving Larry McGrath no chance of staying on board with a major blunder. This was the horse's first non-completion over fences, but I expect we'll see him out again pretty quickly as he'd hardly had much of a race.

Dan De Lion was beaten 38.5l into tenth place in the Class F handicap hurdle, and doesn't look much like a winner in waiting on that evidence. He is next entered in a selling handicap hurdle at Worcester on Wednesday night along with Reedsman; apart from these, the only other engagements for Richard Guest animals between now and Friday are a couple of possibles for the wonderful veteran XAIPETE on the same card, one for BEAUGENCY at Aintree the following night, and a couple at either end of the week in Flat sprint handicaps for FIENNES.

Ostensibly this light week's campaign leaves Guest vulnerable to having his lead at the top of the jumps trainers' table wrested from him by any of the usual protagonists, but let's not lose sight of the fact that - much as I admire the operation - this lead is very much an inflated, false position borne of keeping so many of his early spring horses on the go for as long as he has (and plenty of the soft ground horses at that, in the hope that courses like Cartmel stayed boggy, which this time round they did). Some of them could do with a rest now, or even be put away until the autumn - the likes of Flintoff, Pequenita and He's Hot Right Now, in particular, don't owe him anything more this summer - so a quietening down for a couple of weeks is probably no bad thing.