IN a sense, the latest jumps season in Britain will be overshadowed by what happened at Cheltenham in March.

While there are certainly cracks which need mending rather than papering over, success for Paul Nicholls and Anthony Honeyball at Punchestown shows that the situation is neither desperate nor irreversible, and it should be remembered that the emergence of exceptional horses like Energumene and Shishkin in the same division is good for competition and therefore great for the sport as a whole.