Alan Potts Q & A

27/5/16

You will probably have noticed that I have now all but finished restyling the menu on the right hand side of the Home Page. Once ‘Darts’ has been added it will all be complete. This should make it easier for you to head straight the sport or guest contributor you want to read and keeping them all together rather than scrolling down the old sections to locate what you wanted.

Like myself, Paul Ferguson and Alan Potts are mainly jumps based so their next regular copy won’t be until the jumping game is back in full swing in October. However, Alan will return in early July to cover the key Horses In Training sale at Deauville that has produced many UK winners in recent years. Alan has also suggested that he is up for a Q&A session over the summer if there is sufficient interest where he would be happy to answer any questions whether it be on betting strategy, French racing or any other facet of the game. So if you have anything that you would like to put to Alan, please fire over your questions to [email protected] and I’ll put them to him and will list all of his replies in the next few weeks.

Royal Ascot is looming large but before then we have the two-day Derby Meeting next weekend that will be Days 3 & 4 of the 30 that I am covering for the Flat Season. I am actually thinking of attending the Derby this year, something I said I that would never do again after I last attended in 2003 when Kris Kin won. I wasn’t well that day (and ended up with chicken pox two days later) and abandoned the car about two miles away having already been stuck in traffic for an hour so none of that helped but, with better health and leaving two hours earlier, I feel I should give it another spin if I have recovered from watching Bruce Springsteen the previous night in Coventry.

I have three major jobs on next week; (1) writing the Derby Meeting preview, (2) writing the Royal Ascot trends copy for the Attheraces website and (3) finalising the Euro 2016 preview which I hope to upload on Wednesday which is nine days before the tournament starts.

England play Australia in their second warm-up, friendly international tonight. I wouldn’t be looking to back the Aussies to cause an upset but I do think that it is worth considering laying big-name teams in these pre-tournament friendlies which have zero intensity whatsoever. I don’t have any stats to suggest whether this is a smart thing to do or not but I recall before the World Cup a number of long odds-on shots failing to beat vastly inferior rivals in their friendlies a few weeks before the tournament started including Italy 1-1 Luxembourg, Germany 2-2 Cameroon and England 0-0 Honduras. It might be worth looking at the draw tonight or for other friendlies involving a big team and a minnow in the lead up to the Euros.

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