Graeme Rodway on how to spice up the jumps season

I started last week’s column by suggesting that this jumps season had been a struggle, and there are any number of reasons why. The weather causing havoc with the fixture list has been one of the contributing factors, but uncompetitive racing at the highest levels has been another.

Competition in sport is what makes it fun to watch and enjoyable to bet on, but all too many times in jump racing it’s fairly obvious who might win and that is not what sport is about. It creates a lethargy and with that comes, eventually, a lack of interest.

There have been 52 non-handicap races over jumps worth more than £20,000 in Britain since the start of September and 19 of them featured odds-on favourites. Ten of those market leaders went off shorter than 1-2 and among them were winners who were returned at 1-4, 2-9, 2-11, 1-7 and 1-10.