However, Richard Hills, the man who will be steering Even Top, was not unduly concerned.”It all depends on how you ride this course,” he said, and having enjoyed an extremely profitable winter on the dirt of Nad Al Sheba, he should know. “There are long straights and long corners so there’s plenty of time to move around.”A more important factor than the draw for all the European challengers will be their affinity, or otherwise, with Dubai’s dirt track. Even Top has at least been acclimatising for almost two months, and always gallops behind another horse to give him a taste of the kick-back, but whether he will enjoy receiving constant facefuls of the stuff on Saturday is impossible to say. “I don’t know if you’d call it an advantage for us,” Mandella said, “but for us there’s a better confidence level. We know we’ve done it.”With Juggler, from Australia, also in the field, the second Dubai World Cup will include Group One winners from four continents, with total earnings of $22m (pounds 13.75m), while victory for the Japanese mare Hokuto Vega would push her past Cigar, the winner of the race 12 months ago, as the highest earner in the sport’s history. Great quantities of honour and cash will be at stake on the Dubai dirt this Saturday, and British punters who still believe that the race is little more than a gimmick have just three days left to see sense..

Tony McCoy’s agent, Dave Roberts, yesterday called for a Jockey Club inquiry after the jockey was belatedly ruled out of the Grand National following a fall at Uttoxeter last Tuesday. McCoy was originally signed off for 10 days for concussion by the racecourse doctor, Andrew Toman. However, the Jockey Club’s chief medical adviser, Dr Michael Turner, ruling the initial ban “inappropriate”, increased it to 21 days. “Tony is upset that the decision took so long to be made,” Roberts said, “and that he was informed at 10.30 at night. The doctor at the racecourse allowed Tony to drive home from Uttoxeter. If he was unconscious for three minutes this should never have been allowed.”
Dr Turner said: “The racecourse doctor did not follow the Rules of Racing and handed Tony an inappropriate suspension, which had to be modified I have merely imposed the Rules and rectified the error.”.

Any serious attempt to chronicle the impact made on football in one era by Matt Busby, Bill Shankly and Jock Stein requires an understanding of the important influences that shaped them. Shankly’s description of the marvellous teamwork central to Liverpool’s success under his passionate management as “football socialism” and the bond he forged with the club’s supporters were statements about working- class values, that innate sense of fairness and mutual dependence familiar to all who were born into mining communities.
In the television trilogy Arena: Busby, Stein and Shankly – The Football Men that goes out on BBC2 over Easter weekend, Hugh McIlvanney sees them not merely as great figures in the game, men of wise and independent virtue, but as representatives of the people.Even allowing for its prolific reputation in football (the area around Shankly’s birthplace, Glenbuck, sent out 50 professional players, including 11 internationals), that three such notable managers should be born within a few miles of each other in the west of Scotland coalfield is in itself remarkable.All three knew the hardships and perils of working underground, and with their young athlete’s bodies, and the intelligence, and the courage and the drive that would lead to so many triumphs, they learned what they wanted.Stein would state that he never expected to come across better men than he worked with in the pits (sectarian differences had no currency at the coalface). If more at ease in football’s upper circles, Busby too took strength from a working-class upbringing, strength that enabled him to overcome terrible injuries sustained in the Munich disaster and create another team. Shankly was never less than utterly true to his roots, carrying a deep suspicion of directors to his grave. “The only song I knew by heart was the Red Flag,” he once said.If there is more than a hint of similar political affiliation in McIlvanney’s narrative, and Frank Hanly’s imaginative and sensitive direction, it ought not to trouble them. The truth about Busby, Shankly and Stein, one that affects me personally, is that they gave no evidence of backsliding.

Upon being made a Freeman of Manchester, resplendent in formal attire, Busby began with the words: “I was born in a pitman’s cottage.” Shankly with his Cagneyesque poses and acute sense of imagery – “I’ll visit London again when it’s completed,” he said in retirement – never lost sight of boyhood experiences Enthusiasm was all. “Players who don’t dedicate themselves to the game and forget their duty to the supporters should be jailed,” he snapped.Unlike his two compatriots, both pre-World War Two internationals, Stein achieved no distinction as a player until Celtic recruited him from the Welsh non-League club Llanelli as a reserve centre-half. Selected for the first team in an emergency, he kept his place and led Celtic to victory in the Scottish Cup final.It is Stein’s return to Parkhead, after a successful apprenticeship in management with Dunfermline and Hibernian that brought him to the attention of clubs in England, that provides the most fascinating insights.The music is emotive; the troubled Thirties blues of Duke Ellington over stark images of life in the coalfields; a forgotten music hall artist, Bob Smith, singing the “Red Flag” with stirring clarity; the haunting “Fields of Athenry” emphasising the pervading awfulness of immigrant life in the east Glasgow ghettos.Stein’s arrival back at the club he would transform into a major European force is attended by Dean Martin’s version of “Return to me” It was not without pain. Only the fourth manager Celtic had ever appointed, the first non-Catholic, Stein had to suffer the resentment of fellow Protestants he had thought to be friends. Appalled by bigotry in all its forms, he took their rejection in his stride. “They proved they weren’t my friends,” he said.Considering that Stein had to overcome personal difficulties imposed by sectarianism and cut through the insularity of Scottish football, there is a case for concluding that he established a slight edge in management over Busby and Shankly and such redoubtable contemporaries as Alf Ramsey, Bill Nicholson and Don Revie.Importantly, I think, all abided by a creed of mutual loyalty. From the beginning it was Busby’s resolve to treat players in a way that players of his day were not treated.