World Hurdle Preview:No matter how anyone looks at today's Ladbrokes World Hurdle, it's hard not to conclude that the race is about one horse, Black Jack Ketchum, who has been given a second chance by all this dry weather to prove himself a genuine champion.

After all, up to the end of January, the third-day festival feature was widely presumed to be nothing more than a coronation in waiting for the Jonjo O'Neill-trained horse whose unbeaten career of eight wins in a row had O'Neill proclaiming Black Jack Ketchum to be the best he had trained and Tony McCoy going almost giggly at the prospect of riding him.

The result were prices only just shading odds against with a fearful bookmaking community, but then the king-in-waiting made his fourth visit to Cheltenham in the Cleeve Hurdle and everything changed.

Suddenly the little horse with the big engine was faced with heavy ground for the first time and he ran on it as if it were suet. Black Jack Ketchum's unbeaten record was gone as he struggled home behind Blazing Bailey and Inglis Drever and the aura of invincibility disappeared.

O'Neill's reaction was to rule out any further attempt to run the horse on heavy ground and up to last weekend, there was a strong suggestion that Black Jack Ketchum might not even appear at the festival.

That has now changed and punters are left with a dilemma: was his last run purely due to the ground or is there a kink in the young pretender?

If it was purely the ground, then general odds of 9 to 4 available this morning represent real value.

If it isn't, then there is enough quality in the opposition to find him out. It's an intriguing quandary but at least Black Jack has got the chance to prove himself.

Coincidence punters alone will take encouragement from that since the horse's namesake, the notorious train robber who became the only one ever hanged for train robbery in New Mexico in 1901 only for the law to subsequently be deemed unconstitutional, certainly didn't!

The more hard-headed will look at the race though and guess that Black Jack really will have to be everything he has been cracked up to be in order to win the £250,000 jackpot.

For one thing there is the proven quality of Inglis Drever whose 2005 defeat of Baracouda in this race represents something of a benchmark in the division over the last 10 years.

Baracouda might have been slightly on the slide, but he hadn't slid down far enough to be regarded as anything else but a top horse. Inglis Drever beat him fair and square.

His problem is that a subsequent injury ruled him out of last year and it's still not certain he has returned to that level of form since.

In that fateful Cleeve Hurdle, he finished runner-up to Blazing Bailey and afterwards, jockey Paddy Brennan blamed himself for not realising how much speed Inglis Drever has. He will know today.

Blazing Bailey's name pops up in almost every bit of relevant form and the in-form Alan King fancies his chances in a big way. However, King also admits he would fancy last year's Triumph Hurdle third even more if the ground was a lot softer.

Despite that, it's hard to see this admirable type being out of the frame.

Irish hopes rest with Strangely Brown, a Grade One winner as a juvenile hurdler in France, but whose form this season has tailed off, as well as Asian Maze who ran honourably in Tuesday's Champion Hurdle and who has been left in the longer race by trainer Tom Mullins.

Baracouda's trainer Francois Doumen returns to the race again, this time with Kasbah Bliss.

However, if there is one to take advantage if Black Jack Ketchum doesn't live up to the hype, it looks to be Mighty Man who ran third to My Way de Solzen last year and represents an exceptionally shrewd trainer in Henry Daly.

Just like the favourite, Mighty Man's chances are increasing all the time as the ground dries out and his form at Aintree last year, when comprehensively beating My Way de Solzen, reads extremely well now.

Daly has deliberately not run the horse since beating Blazing Bailey at Ascot last December and at the odds, he represents a more attractive bet than Black Jack Ketchum.

Maybe it really was the ground that did for Black Jack seven weeks ago but for a top-notch horse, he still looked to cut out alarmingly quickly, no matter what the surface.

Maybe the real Black Jack will be on show now but his namesake was also put on show 106 years ago after his hanging and it was pretty gruesome.

Apparently no one in New Mexico knew the correct length of rope for hanging and old Jack ended up being decapitated.

Maybe punters will be better advised to not lose their heads this afternoon!

Verdict

1 Mighty Man

2 Blazing Bailey

3 Black Jack Ketchum