Cheltenham Festival Eyecatchers: Chases

The Cheltenham Festival produced four intense days of jumps racing action, with lots of winners making their splashes on the grand stage.

Alongside the brilliant winners, there were some unlucky losers and eyecatchers with an eye to the future. Here are a quartet that ran well in defeat over fences.

Jonbon

The easy one. Jonbon made a jumping error in the middle stages of the Queen Mother Champion Chase that saw him shuffling back through the pack into last spot.

It surely cost him his chance at a Festival win, but it was to his eternal credit that he rallied up the Cheltenham hill to finish second behind the impressive winner Marine Nationale. The result might have been the same in any scenario.

Trainer Nicky Henderson and rider Nico de Boinville both felt that Jonbon's chances were compromised at the start, getting too close for comfort to the starting tape.

The Melling Chase at Aintree is next on the agenda. He won that race 12 months ago and is 3-3 around the Merseyside venue. More success on Merseyside probably beckons.

Malina Girl

The record of Irish horses in the Ultima is well documented and 19 successive renewals have now passed since any horse from the Emerald Isle has scored.

Malina Girl for Gavin Cromwell was well-touted this time around and she ran a cracker to finish third. She made a bad mistake as early as the second fence and finished off strongly to be third behind all-the-way winner Myretown, with The Changing Man splitting them.

She is a winner over nearly three-and-a-half-miles at Cheltenham in the past and stamina is a key trait, as she showed again here. She'll need quite a few to come out if she's going to get into the Grand National but, wherever she goes next, a big prize in a staying chase could be pending.

Anyway

David Budds will have been thrilled to see Anyway taking a silver medal from the Jack Richards Novices' Limited Handicap Chase behind impressive all-the-way winner Caldwell Potter.

Paul Nicholls' grey dominated the race and wasn't for stopping late on, but Anyway battled on to finish second, beating some useful types in Nurburgring, Firefox and The Other Mozzie.

Anyway was making just his fifth start over fences and his first outing in a handicap over the larger obstacles.

He had run with credit in a decent beginners' contest at Leopardstown over Christmas and is far from exposed at intermediate distances.

He tackled this assignment off a mark of 139 and has plenty of scope for better things with Fairyhouse and Punchestown to come this spring.

Willitgoahead

Wonderwall held off Its On The Line to win the Hunters' Chase on Friday in a cracking finish, while Willitgoahead was behind in third spot.

He'd won at Thurles in January in this sphere before leaving Sean Doyle to join Elliott and owners Robcour and this was just his third outing under Rules.

Punchestown could be the next destination for him, but before that don't rule out Aintree for a horse who jumped and moved well throughout the amateur riders' Gold Cup before just failing to see out the Cheltenham hill as the pair that finished ahead of him.

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