WHEN dealing with trainers who are powerful in terms of numbers, it’s rarely wise to back horses blind, but it’s also true that digging too deep for profitable angles can lead to unnatural positives, and if you establish that backing chesnut fillies with one-word names only on Mondays and Thursdays is your route to profit, then you’re trying too hard. There is something in concentrating on Mondays, but that’s an article for another day.

It’s important if you’re going to take an approach of following individual trainers that you have enough data to suggest that a successful angle is more than a flash in the pan. While it’s a huge boon to latch on to a talented trainer before the betting market factors in what you’ve seen, it’s better as a rule to focus on established trainers, and their habits, where such patterns can be interrogated in a more robust fashion.

The trainers below have the firepower to be numerically successful in the early weeks of the new season in Britain, and all are capable of producing winners at decent prices at a fairly regular rate.

I take the view that when betting in pattern races, the savvy punter is best concentrating on the horse rather than the trainer, and established form will be more useful than any systems for such races. On the other hand, races where there is little form on which to judge the horses offer opportunities for those who analyse the trainer trends and patterns.

David O’Meara

Willow Farm, Upper Helmsley, York

David O’Meara very much hit the ground running when taking over at Roger Fell’s yard at Arthington Barn Stables in 2010, and a decade later he has consolidated that fine start with some impressive numbers, finishing 2019 with 130 winners in Britain, and earnings of £2.4 million from those successes. Initially viewed as a northern handicap specialist, David has very much broken that mould, and aside from his domestic plaudits, has achieved international success at the highest level with Move In Time (Prix de l’Abbaye), Amazing Maria (Prix Rothschild), Mondialiste (Woodbine Mile, Arlington Million) and Suedois (Shadwell Turf Mile).

He upstaged some of the biggest names in the business when landing a double on Champions Day at Ascot last October, and his star is again in the ascendant after a couple of seasons where the team were adjusting to life in a new setting, the trainer having moved to his current base, Willow Farm, in 2016.

Such a pattern is typical, and last season’s improved strike-rate is a sign that O’Meara is fully established at his current yard, and ready to kick on again. That is the primary reason why I believe he’ll be worth following for punters in the coming months, even though a five-year analysis of his results might suggest otherwise.

Despite his success at the highest level, David still has plenty of horses to compete at the more modest level of handicaps around the Yorkshire area, and it’s not a huge surprise to find that his strike-rate at the lower echelons is better than in higher-class handicaps.

My feeling is that David will prove profitable to follow in handicaps at the many Yorkshire tracks, but those following his runners have always enjoyed particular success at Ripon and Beverley, and those tracks should provide plenty of winners again when racing resumes. Redcar, Ayr and Haydock should also provide positive returns.

One notable aspect of last year’s resurgence for the yard was the record of the juvenile runners in the first few months of the season. O’Meara would not have been regarded as a specialist trainer of two-year-olds when at his old base, but backing his early season juveniles has actually been a pretty rewarding experience since the move to Upper Helmsley, with the youngsters often running well at the first time of asking, and that shows a growing focus.

Expect him to improve on last year’s figures, and back all his two-year-old runners on debut in ordinary novice events (not maidens).

Richard Hughes

Weathercock House, Upper Lambourn

Like David O’Meara, Richard Hughes is a trainer who appears to offer no obvious angle for punters at first glance, and blind backers have lost significant sums in each of his full seasons with a licence, but also like O’Meara, he’s had a change of stable since first taking out a training licence, having bought the historic Weathercock House before the start of the 2016 flat season.

He admits that he’s faced challenges in his short career to date, but he’s had time to face up to those, and should begin to build on his initial success from a yard which is full to capacity and with a team which is now well-established.

Unlike O’Meara, Hughes has proved rather more successful with his runners on the all-weather, and since the start of last year, he has been operating at better than 18% on the artificial surfaces. It’s worth noting that the two tracks where punters haven’t made a profit in the past 15 months have been those with Tapeta surfaces at Wolverhampton and Newcastle.

That may prove to be a blip, and 2020 was proving the trainer’s best year in terms of strike-rate prior to the cessation of racing, with 13 wins from 42 runs an excellent performance at an admittedly uncompetitive time of year.

I don’t know why the trainer’s record on turf is lagging behind that on the all-weather, but it’s been rather stagnant in the past few years by comparison, and actually dropped to just over 8% last year.

As a result, I would leave the turf runners alone until such times as the strike rate improves, and concentrate on runners at all-weather tracks, notably Southwell, Lingfield and Kempton.

It’s very much worth noting Richard’s runners in restricted novice events, and he does particularly well with his runners in median auction events.

His handicap record is also decent, although backers would be better off taking early prices about his handicap runners, as the winners are often heavily backed, and while they produce a good profit at early prices and at Betfair odds, those taking SP have seen such projected profits wiped out by skinny returns.

Paul & Oliver Cole

Whatcombe, Oxfordshire

Paul Cole is well into the veteran stage as a trainer, but when racing resumes, he will be one of a number of trainers to take advantage of the change in licensing rules which will officially allow training partnerships, and he will be formally teaming up with son Oliver when the green light is given for racing to restart.

In truth, this will not represent much of a change, with Cole jr having been involved with the yard for many years, but after a period in the doldrums, 2019 was the stable’s best for a decade in terms of earnings, with Duke Of Hazzard winning three pattern races on the bounce after being fitted with blinkers.

There are few other stars in the yard, but it’s the blinkers angle which makes the Cole operation particularly interesting. As a rule, the fitting of headgear is a universal negative, with horse population as a whole showing a worse record with headgear as opposed to without it, and many trainers only use blinkers when they believe a horse is not performing to its ability in the first place.

There are, however, a small number of trainers for whom the fitting of blinkers is a big positive, and Paul Cole has been one of those yards in recent times.

Since the start of 2019, Cole has run seven horses in blinkers for the first time, and four of those (including Duke Of Hazzard) were winners, with another placed at a big price. Going back a decade, the figures are not so dramatic, but Cole’s runners in first-time blinkers have regularly bucked the trend, winning at a rate of around 20%, which is almost twice as often as his runners in no headgear.

With the stable already 1-1 for such horses this season, and a healthy 43% strike rate overall in the new year, it should pay to follow those in blinkers, either for the first time, or where the horse in question has already won in the headgear.