McCain tells northern trainers: stop moaning and take fight to southern yards

Donald McCain has urged his fellow northern-based trainers to give their southern counterparts a harder time and "send them back down the motorway".

McCain, who is having a good season with 41 winners on the board, and whose Stable Tour appears in Thursday's Racing Post, said of the northern jumps scene: “It’s struggling. The world’s getting smaller, people are more inclined to travel and horses run in the north from down south, but that’s not an issue.

"I get slightly frustrated sometimes with some of the northern trainers that they don’t get stuck in and take them on and send them back down the motorway.

“They’d sooner complain about it and do nothing about it. The one thing I try to do a bit, if I can, is to make sure they don’t have an easy ride when they do come up.

“I get a bit frustrated sometimes that some of the other ones would sooner complain about it and not actually take a punt, because if you don’t take them on they’re going to keep coming up. Look at the motorways getting shorter, it’s a small world."

He added: “I’m lucky because I can travel south as well. They’ll go anywhere to win races. That’s nobody’s fault. That’s the industry. You’ve got to be competitive and not make it easy.”

McCain was speaking in the Jockey Club’s Love The Jumps podcast, in which he also looked back on the events of two years ago, when he lost the patronage of Paul and Clare Rooney, which amounted to about 50 horses.

The Cheshire-based trainer told the podcast: “I think it was the 12 months before that were the most difficult. It was getting harder and harder to keep people happy and so on and, you know what, from the day it happened you’re very hard on yourself and think you’re doing everything wrong."

Asked if he doubted himself at the time, McCain replied: “Oh 100 per cent. I’m not particularly proud of the way I handled the whole thing. But when you’re being told every day by certain quarters that everything you’re doing is wrong it starts getting in your head.

"And it took for them to go and [me] to sit down and realise I’ve now, in not that long a time, trained over a thousand winners in this place. So I must have been doing something right."

Members can read Donald McCain's Stable Tour on racingpost.com from 6pm on Wednesday