Betfair Chase: who will come out on top on unusually dry ground at Haydock?

What comes to mind if someone uses the phrase "Betfair Chase ground", as in: "Look at them toiling through that, it's real Betfair Chase ground"? Okay, I've given you a bit of a steer there.

I have come to think of the Haydock contest as an attritional test and that is sort-of justified by the fact that the going that day has been soft or heavy for seven of the last nine runnings. But if that's what you also instinctively expect, you'll need to recalibrate your thinking ahead of this year's contest on Saturday.

The groundstaff at Haydock are not desperate for rain, as some of their colleagues are at tracks like Wincanton. But the going for Saturday's action is not likely to be worse than good to soft, Kirkland Tellwright tells the Front Runner.

"For the first time in my life, being in the Cheshire Gap is yielding its reward," Tellwright says. "If the rest of the country is good to soft, Haydock has a tradition of being something south of that.

3.00 Haydock Saturday: Betfair Chase racecard and betting

"We've got sufficient rain to be in a good place as of now. If it doesn't go mad in the next week, we're going to be in a really good place.

"We've got rain forecast on Wednesday, which would be perfect. We are currently good to soft and I think we could well be good to soft next Saturday. The forecast would suggest we're going to stay like that."

Quantities of rainfall are notoriously hard to predict but current forecasts suggest the Merseyside track might only get 2mm or so this week, while temperatures will remain in double figures for most of the time. It all points to Haydock being less of a stamina test than normal at this time of year when a field of top-class staying chasers lines up this weekend.

How will that affect the race? I tend to think it tilts things in favour of the favourite, A Plus Tard, still available at 5-2 in places. He's perfectly fine on ordinary good to soft going. It wasn't a testing surface when he won the Savills Chase or when he was runner-up in the Gold Cup.

The next two in the betting are Bristol De Mai and Royale Pagaille, thorough stayers who are very comfortable with clods of mud whistling past their ears. Also trading at single-figure odds is Waiting Patiently, another for whom proper soft ground is basically good news.

Some caveats need to be added here, especially in the case of Bristol De Mai, who cannot be pigeonholed simply as a mudlover. The going was officially good for the 2018 Betfair, which he won in a time three seconds faster than standard.

Bristol De Mai: brilliant grey cannot be pigeonholed simply as a mudloverCredit: John Grossick (racingpost.com/photos)

You could look at those behind him and argue they needed the run or were even less well suited by the ground than the great grey. But it was a big performance, whichever way you slice it, and he looked fine on the unusually dry surface.

Of course, he was a young horse of seven then. Now he's ten and only Native River is older than him, of the 16 still entered. Does he still have the pace to run to his best on this kind of surface? Nigel Twiston-Davies could not have been less concerned about it when I asked him at Cheltenham on Sunday, but the trainer has never lacked faith in Bristol.

Somewhere in this race is a horse who is about to run well on unseasonably dry ground, and is currently a bigger price than he should be because the betting market hasn't really begun to grapple with the race yet. I'm inclined to think it may be Imperial Aura, now 14-1, for whom soft ground may have been a problem as he steps up in distance to three miles.

He would be a faster type than most of his rivals here and Kim Bailey hopes he has been helped by a wind operation in the off-season. He carries the Imperial Commander colours that were involved in a couple of epic Betfair Chases and they may be to the fore once again on Saturday.