No cause for alarm despite another festival blank

For the third year in succession the Cheltenham Festival has passed by with no northern-trained winner. But 2017 will go down as the year of the Irish, with just nine races being won by British stables although none of them based north of the Trent.

That's the way it goes, the powerbase of jumping changes. It always has. It used to be Easterby, FitzGerald and Dickinson, then it was Nicholls and Henderson, now it is Mullins, Elliott and Henderson.

It certainly isn't all doom and gloom in the north, though. Cloudy Dream, for example, ran a fine race in the Racing Post Arkle. He was a useful hurdler, he is now a very useful chaser, but he met an even better one in Altior.