I asked a load of top trainers what they'd have done with Constitution Hill - here's what they said

What an utterly pointless palaver. Waiting all summer for confirmation that Constitution Hill was staying over hurdles was a bit like writing nothing but your name on an exam paper and waiting for the results to come out to see if you had passed or not. The outcome was inevitable and nothing that happened in the interim was going to change that.

Yet the breaking news from Seven Barrows on Tuesday morning was met with a mixture of shock and horror and, once again, it was Nicky Henderson who had to shoulder most of the blame for failing the public. How dare he deprive us of the most exhilarating element of the whole jumps season? Shame on him.

Here is a flavour of some of the tweets (actually, are they even called tweets anymore? Xs, are they?) in reply to the Racing Post's post stating Constitution Hill will remain over hurdles this season: "Typical Henderson kid gloves approach"; "Henderson deserves every bit of negativity he gets"; "Hendo still lacks a pair"; "pathetic"; "spineless". And my personal favourite: "All Henderson and Buckley will achieve by the relegation of Constitution Hill into a series of bad races is reduce him to a sideshow."