Which Scottish Grand National contenders fit the single most important trend?

When Noble Yeats won last year's Grand National as a novice over fences, there was an understandable rush to praise his trainer Emmet Mullins. In hindsight a better reaction would have been to ask why it had taken so long. All the other spring marathons, the Scottish Grand National included, have long since been dominated by unexposed chasers.

The choice of 'unexposed' over 'novice' is deliberate. It is likely the betting public makes too much of the bare fact of whether or not a horse is a novice chaser. The overwhelming majority of the time, the pertinent point about novice chasers in open handicaps is that they are unexposed. Their status is only a line in the sand.

On that subject, it speaks to the strength of the angle that the Scottish National is still dominated by novices and other unexposed chasers. That is because there is a three-mile novice handicap chase on the same card, which in 2018 received a big injection of prize-money. Two horses were scratched from the Scottish Grand National at the declarations stage to run in that race instead, and others among the nine declared for the novice race might have rolled the big dice if the softer option did not exist.