Paul Nicholls claims there are options at both Aintree and Ayr for his highly-rated novice chaser Black Corton.
The seven-year-old only finished fifth in the RSA Insurance Chase at the Cheltenham Festival last month but overall it has been a fine season for a runner tipped for greater things.
With options north of the border and on Merseyside, Nicholls says Black Corton will be set for one more run-out this season, as he looks to finish the campaign on a real high.
He told At The Races: “He’s just had an easy couple of weeks. There’s a three-mile-one-furlong Grade One novice chase at Aintree and there’s also a £100,000 three-mile novice handicap at Ayr the following week, which is a new race and an interesting race. He could run in that actually.
“He’ll run in one of those two, I’d say. We’d obviously like to run him at Aintree, but I would like to run him on some better ground, at long last.
“He ran a bit free at Cheltenham. We rode him to win and if we’d ridden him a bit conservatively, we might have finished third.”