On Friday it was Brighton, where two tracked tipsters backed the same beaten horse. Saturday raised the stakes. Newsboy of the Daily Mirror and Robin Goodfellow of the Daily Mail – Fleet Street’s two longest-serving racing pseudonyms – napped the same two-year-old filly, Oddschecker’s flagship column priced her at 2/1, and Harry Wilson advised her at 7/2. Four verdicts, one horse: Nuit D’Eclair in the Sweet Solera Stakes at Newmarket. For anyone opening a Newsboy tips record, or Goodfellow’s, or Rob Wright’s, this was the day all three began – and the beginning was identical: 9.0 units each.
Bank Yesterday
Tips (1u each)
Winners
Current Bank (units)
Status
The Big Hits
No tracked newspaper found a winner on Saturday, so the big hit belongs to the filly who beat them all. Sugar Yes Please, an 11/1 shot, won the Sweet Solera by half a length from Nuit D’Eclair, with 14/1 chance Martinet third. Nuit D’Eclair went off 6/4 favourite carrying more editorial weight than any juvenile filly should be asked to shoulder, and she ran her race – beaten half a length in a Group 3 is no disgrace. But naps are win bets. A beaten nap costs a unit wherever she finishes, and this one cost four of them across the roster in the space of two minutes.
Thirty-five minutes later the other Fleet Street nap went the same way. Rob Wright of The Times had made Mysterious Times his best bet in the nursery on the same card; the market sent him off at 6/5, and Eabha beat him at 15/2, with Oddschecker’s second bet in the race, Sanbona Warrior, back in fourth at 11/4. Two races, two beaten Newmarket jollies, six units of tracked money gone in barely half an hour: four bets on Nuit D’Eclair, two more in the nursery. When I was tipping for a living we called that kind of afternoon a “consensus”. The word never appeared in the results column.
The Eliminations & Misses
A word on how the papers are settled, because this ledger shows its workings. The Mirror, Mail and Times columns each publish a daily nap that is syndicated through the public naps tables; their secondary selections are not reliably visible outside the papers themselves, so all three are tracked on naps only until that changes. No advised prices could be verified either – the tracking sites quoted conflicting figures – so all three were settled at SP under the house rules. On Saturday the distinction cost nobody anything: every one of them lost at every price on offer.
Oddschecker’s footnote deserves its own line, since they had bets in both wrecks. Nuit D’Eclair at 2/1 and Sanbona Warrior at 9/4 both went down, Leadman at 16/1 each-way finished ninth of thirteen at Haydock, and then Prince Quattro – advised at 5/2 – won the Newmarket finale at 10/3 to spare the column a whitewash. Half a unit down on the day, 7.5 overall, and that genuinely counts as their best Saturday of the series to date. The bar is where the bar is.
Today’s Outlook
So the newspaper battle this series promised begins in a dead heat: Newsboy 9.0, Robin Goodfellow 9.0, Rob Wright 9.0, with Templegate – the fourth print man, and the only one with a winner to his name – sitting a unit behind them after his own 0-from-3 card. Sunday offers Phoenix Stakes day at the Curragh, Group 1 racing at Deauville, and domestic fare at Chepstow and Leicester, where Art Lover heads the market in the feature. The first paper to a winner takes the early bragging rights. The first to zero leaves the page for good. Those are the only two rules that matter here.