IT has been a strong start to the season in the hunter chase division. Last Sunday’s Carey Glass Hunters Chase was the fifth such race of the campaign thus far, and they have each produced five different winners.

After Grange Island opened the season in the division when winning at Fairyhouse for Liam Burke, Emmet Mullins became the only trainer to have won more than one hunter chase this season with the Christmas successes of Its On The Line and Romeo Magico at Down Royal and Limerick respectively.

Most recently, it has been Philip Rothwell’s Casey West who claimed the spoils at Clonmel before Ferns Lock enhanced his reputation within the division for David Christie in the aforementioned Thurles contest last weekend.

The latter shot ahead of his Down Royal conqueror Its On The Line by moving to the summit of the ante-post market for the hunter chase at Cheltenham, and while the picture for those big marquee spring festival contests will become clearer on both sides of the Irish Sea in the coming weeks, recent races here have suggested the domestic scene has reason to be hopeful.

After starting on a slower note when just six runners contested the Fairyhouse race in November, field sizes across the following four races have held up very well, with double-figure runners contesting the last four races.

That is particularly key in the context of the new media rights agreement that came into effect at the start of the year.

Earlier this month, Ruby Walsh wrote about the potential impact that this new media rights agreement could have on the race programme here in his Irish Examiner column.

“The golden goose that was payment-per-race is gone forever, and now how much is bet on each race, driven by the streaming market, will determine the income each racecourse receive,” he stated.

“Last Monday, the landscape changed forever for Irish racecourses when the new performance-related media rights deal kicked into action.

“How many runners a race attracts and what the attendance is to drive on-course turnover will start to become factors.

“We are led to believe small fields are not good betting races, and a minimum of eight runners is required to make a race attractive.”

Average number

Concern has been expressed in the past about the figures for the average number of runners in conditions hunter chases here.

Taking the Tetretema Cup as an example, the contraction in the field sizes for these conditions hunter chases becomes immediately clear.

In the last 10 years, an average field of seven has lined up for the race, but in the 10 years before that, the average field size for the race stood at 17.

That is a worrying collapse in the average field size for the race from one decade to another, and while that may be the picture for just one race in isolation, it presents a stark depiction.

The new media rights deal is clearly going to result in a greater focus being placed on examining how individual races and race types are performing, with a significant chunk of racecourses income dependent on it.

Encouragingly, as the new rights landscape comes into being, the conditions hunter chases at Down Royal and Thurles this season have both produced field sizes with double-figure runners.

At Thurles, 10 runners lined up in the hunter chase, up from six and seven in the two previous years, with the Down Royal race continuing to be the positive outlier in the category by consistently producing double-figure field sizes without fail for over 15-plus years.

As we move into the spring, when opportunities for open horses in the pointing fields are plentiful, it will be interesting to see if the positive signs from Down Royal and Thurles can be maintained at this important time.

EACH passing week this month has brought another batch of Cheltenham Festival entries as the build-up to those four big days in the middle of March at Prestbury Park begins.

The Festival has proven to be a fine advertisement for the impact of point-to-point racing on the wider National Hunt scene at present.

Last season, when the two juvenile races were excluded, point-to-pointers accounted for 30% of the runners at the Festival, and if the entries that have been released in recent weeks are anything to go by, that influence is only going to be even stronger this year.

Again, removing the Triumph Hurdle from the equation, and with the initial entries having been released for 13 of the Grade 1 contests at the Festival, from the championship races through to the novice events over both hurdles and fences, ex-Irish pointers feature en masse.

In total, they account for 40% of the near 500 entries that have so far been made, headlined by 10 of the 20 entries for the blue riband Gold Cup.

Last Tuesday brought the entries for the novice hurdles, and it is here where the influence of pointers is particularly pronounced.

Just under half of the 212 entries for the Festival novice hurdles are made up of horses who started their careers in the pointing fields here, with the greatest proportion coming in the staying division, where former point-to-pointers account for 39 of the 63 entries in the Albert Bartlett novice hurdle. The future certainly looks bright.