Gordon Elliott: My Wednesday runners at Fairyhouse

Gordon Elliott sends his runners to Fairyhouse on Wednesday

Cause Of Causes, Shrapnel and Totally Couture make the short trip to Fairyhouse for today's Irish action. Gordon Elliott gives us the low-down on each of their chances today. 

13:15 - Cause Of Causes

Owned by the Timeform/Betfair racing club, he ran a cracker on his handicap debut to come second in the Galway Hurdle. In fact, he was unlucky not to win at Ballybrit but we were still chuffed with the place considering he went off near 200.0199/1 on Betfair. He didn't show the same level of form when sixth of ten runners last time at Perth, although the race we had him in was a fairly tricky handicap. It's fair to describe Perth as disappointing after his near-miss at Galway but he's in good shape at home so I hope he bounces back to form. It's a difficult race to call but he'll come on for the run regardless and all going well, the next stop will be the Open Meeting at Cheltenham. 

14:15 - Shrapnel

Absolutely delighted with his two-mile maiden hurdle win at Galway recently as it was his first run for our yard since arriving from Charles Byrnes'. He's stepping back up in trip to two and-a-half miles today but that distance will be no problem and his jockey, Davy Russell, knows him very well. I'm expecting another big run this afternoon but to be honest, this looks a trappy sort of a race that could be hard to win so if he can at least land a place, I'll go home happy. Longer term, he looks like a chaser in the making but as mentioned, he's relatively new to the yard so we are still learning about his preferences. 

15:20 Fairyhouse - Totally Couture

He's only raced twice so he's a work in progress and I've been trying to improve his strength. He finished mid-division in his debut bumper Gowran last month but showed some improvement in a similar race at Galway last week so we hope he's on the right track. It was suggested that he looked a little one-paced at Galway but in fairness, it was a somewhat falsely run race with no proper gallop so I don't think we can look too deeply into that form. As I say, we are still going through a learning-process at the moment so it's hard to say how he might run - but if we can get him to place, it would be a nice step in the right direction.