Doncaster Cantley Park

This was such a heartbreaking competition for us last year, and this year was looking increasingly disasterous on the dog front, with 6 dogs coming down injured in the preceeding week. We can’t seem to shake the bad luck at Cantley, and being a suspicious bunch we might make the longer trek over to the Wirral next year instead. Still, Doncaster do throw a good tournament, everything ran like clockwork and the venue is lovely. I just wish every person and dog would stay healthy when we attend!

Dylan was supposed to be running on Sunday, in one of the lower teams who had a tough draw and needed a faster dog to bring them within touching distance of their seed-time. Mollie was always down for Barking Owlers on Saturday, but slowly her team-mates were falling like flies; Kim out, Lolly out with a cruciate tear, Bailey out when her lift’s dog collapsed on Friday night. So Dylan stepped in (emergency measures!) and we ran a 4-dog team over 13″ all day.

Now, Mollie was the height dog, and being an older lady we normally limit her to running over 11/12″ at most. Lucy (Labrador x Spaniel) also normally runs over 10-11″, and she ended up pulling a muscle in the afternoon session. So we were a little down-and-out! I think we finished 5th in the end, way off our seed-time, but we made the other teams work for their wins and Dylan loved running with Mollie.

As we’d technically run all our available dogs on Saturday, we didn’t really have to go back again on Sunday. But Bailey needed a handler as Emma was nursing her 21st birthday hangover, and with 4 teams in, a few extra pairs of hands wouldn’t go amiss! Normally I don’t detail exactly what happened at flyball, but I know Emma will be wanting a blow-by-blow account of how fab her little girl was. And Bailey was awesome, she ran her little white socks off! She was happy when she realised I had a tub full of sausages for her, and we won all our morning races. Unfortunately it all went a bit pear-shaped after lunch …

Bailey was running as normal in the warm-up, but when she set off in the first leg, she did 2 hurdles and then slammed on the breaks. I’m pretty sure the whole team shrieked! She ran in a small circle and then found what had caused the halt: a dropped dog-treat behind the second hurdle*. Despite having eaten it, she slammed on the breaks again in the second leg, and we lost that one too. Two down, one last chance … and Bailey ran perfectly, gave the team a good advantage … until our fourth dog got a light for an early change. Oops!

*I think the dropped treats were from somebody who had run Starters, which had run in the same ring just before our division started.

We lost all the afternoon legs, although Bails was back to being a superstar again. I think we finished 5th, so couldn’t send Bailey home with a rosette, sorry Emma!