PERHAPS it is the roadsign that puts people off, the brown tourist sign near the Minster that points to “Racecourse” and “Workhouse” as if they were one and the same place. There has to be some good reason why Southwell cannot draw a crowd worthy of the name even when it stages a day of the St Leger meeting.
Yesterday’s six-race card contained decent handicaps transferred from Doncaster and offered £88,000 in prizemoney, much the richest Flat programme ever seen at a venue more accustomed to churning out low-value allweather fare. But it hardly caused a stir among the good people of Nottinghamshire.
The Southwell Advertiser reported on its front page that 3,000 turned up at the racecourse last weekend for a civil war re-enactment. The entertainment yesterday was less bloodthirsty and, sadly, far less popular.
Southwell did its best, announcing portentously that “a panel of judges will be roving the racecourse” adjudicating a “Best Hat” award. They spent much of the afternoon trying desperately to find feminine alternatives to an assortment of flat caps and the rakish trilbies of the racecourse stewards.
It might be more explicable if this was an unpleasant place to visit. Southwell, however, is an attractive town and the racecourse is trim and treelined, with a pastoral outlook of gentle hills and a church spire.
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Catering is agreeable — even Sir Clement Freud says so — and facilities have recently been enhanced by squashy leather sofas in the bars, hanging baskets softening the industrial estate image of the stands, and wooden garden furniture on the lawns.
Regulars swear by the place, one telling me yesterday that he prefers it to York, where the more prestigious races of the Leger meeting will be run today and tomorrow. The trouble, though, is that there are so few of them.
Numbers have been eroded by the low expectations that come with a relentless diet of racing that discerning judges might regard as dross. When a day like this comes along, with good horses running on the underused turf track, it can drift past unnoticed.
It even seemed to have slipped the attention of those who should know better, such was the paucity of trainers on show. This, though, is a place where everyone seems pleasantly surprised to see a new face and nobody was more welcome yesterday than Godolphin’s trainer, Saeed bin Suroor.
Normally, in the first week of September, Suroor and the sheikhs are busily deciding whether to spend Saturday watching their fancied runner in the Irish Champion Stakes or the St Leger. This year, they are unrepresented in both the weekend highlights, so the trainer was free to expand his racing experiences here.
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He was a late arrival, though managed as ever to look supremely unflustered as he met his first runner, Red Admiral, on its way onto the track. “It’s my first time here,” Suroor explained. “And the traffic was bad.” Probably a school run, though, rather than a frantic tailback down the two-mile private road to the races.
Suroor’s presence was endorsed in the highest-grade race of the day, the Rippon Homes Conditions Stakes. There were only six runners and Godolphin were responsible for half of them, a trio prowling the sand track before the off as if they suspected they were back in Dubai.
Into The Dark went off favourite but it was the appropriately named Desert Authority who led the royal blue party home. “Into The Dark was too keen,” the trainer declared. “But I’m sure he will improve.”
He issued a bulletin on his Doncaster runners, concentrating on Iffraaj, who contests the Park Stakes tomorrow. “The drying ground will suit him. He’s learnt from his races and he’s professional now.” And his verdict on Southwell? “Good racetrack. Nice place.”
Kevin Ryan thought so, too, having had his journey from North Yorkshire justified when Blades Girl burst off the home turn to spreadeagle a competitive field in the seven-furlong handicap. “It’s a bit like Chester round here and you’ve got to get first run on them,” he said.
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Ryan is an established top-ten trainer now but his 12 forays in group races this year have produced eight places and not a single winner. “We keep knocking on the door and hopefully it might fall for us at York tomorrow, with Wi Dud in the Flying Childers,” he said.
York’s glittering card today includes three group twos and two listed races. The Knavesmire will doubtless be buzzing. Would the same card have stirred Southwell out of its self-induced langour?
DOZEN IN LEGER
Sixties Icon will face 11 rivals in the Ladbrokes St Leger at York tomorrow after there were no overnight withdrawals for the world’s oldest classic.