White Birch is all set to return to action in the Royal Bahrain Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown on Saturday week.<\/p>\n
The five-year-old sat out of the major midsummer prizes because of the prevailing fast ground and has been restricted to only two runs so far this term.<\/p>\n
Both came at the Curragh in May in which he chased home Los Angles in the Coolmore Stud City Of Troy Irish European Breeders Fund Mooresbridge Stakes and finished fourth behind the same rival after a troubled passage through the Tattersalls Gold Cup.<\/p>\n
Assistant trainer George Murphy told Wednesday\u2019s Nick Luck Daily Podcast:<\/a> \u201cIt\u2019s all systems go to run.<\/p>\n \u201cBack in the mid-summer we gave him a little bit of a break and just eased things up a little bit, a bit of a freshen up and have been building up to an autumn campaign since then. He\u2019s training very well and is in great form.<\/p>\n \u201cHe doesn\u2019t like the firm ground and there\u2019s some lovely races at the end of the season so we said we\u2019d aim for them and that\u2019s the plan. Hopefully all will go well.”<\/p>\n Of the two starts this season, Murphy added: \u201cI thought first run was a very good run, he battled hard and put it up to Los Angeles. We were very pleased with that but the second run didn\u2019t really work out. He still ran with a lot of credit, and I don\u2019t think he did anything wrong.”<\/p>\n The Qatar Prix de l\u2019Arc de Troimphe is another key target for White Birch but connections feel they have him spot-on for the Leopardstown race.<\/p>\n \u201cThey\u2019re both very important races, I think we have him very fit now and you\u2019re not going to go into the Irish Champion thinking you\u2019re not 100%. He\u2019s as good as I can get him without having a run.<\/p>\n “We\u2019d have probably liked one prep run before Leopardstown but it didn\u2019t work out, the ground was very quick,” Murphy admitted.<\/p>\n \u201cBoth races have been the plan for a while and if he was to go close in either that would be great.”<\/p>\n More from Sporting LifeSafer gambling<\/p>\n We are committed in our support of safer gambling. Recommended bets are advised to over-18s and we strongly encourage readers to wager only what they can afford to lose.<\/p>\n If you are concerned about your gambling, please call the National Gambling Helpline \/ GamCare<\/a> on 0808 8020 133.<\/p>\n Further support and information can be found at begambleaware.org<\/a> and gamblingtherapy.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"White Birch is all set to return to action in the Royal Bahrain Irish Champion Stakes at Leopardstown…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":111237,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[3004,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-111236","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-racing","tag-racing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111236","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=111236"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/111236\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111237"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=111236"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=111236"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=111236"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}