Simple question really, are the English good enough?
It's quite an open one as well, but here we're going to look at the sport aspects and assess if this week has highlighted cracks in our sport over here.
The horse racing was a whitewash at the Cheltenham Festival, the Irish battered us and we just couldn't respond to it.
Now that issue has nothing to do with the quality of jockeys, even though Rachel Blackmore oozed sheer brilliance all week from the saddle and rightly took the top jockey title home with her.
The problem with racing seems to be competition orientated and as I sat and watched Racing Debate on Sky Sports Racing, Matt Chapman just makes so much sense with his comments about where things went wrong.
Action will be taken now by the racing authorities over here to bridge the gap between us and the Irish game, or so we would hope, because we cannot, and I repeat, cannot be dominated like that again at the Cheltenham Festival.
If you hadn't seen enough of the Irish beating the English then you were in luck on Saturday night.
Ireland were dominate in their Six Nations match against England and it just summed up the week really.
For the Irish it's great, they've given us a beating in the biggest racing Festival of the year, and then they've given us a thrashing in the rugby as well, Gareth Southgate will just be glad his England football team don't play any Irish team during this International break!
I think we know fine well we have the quality over here to succeed but it just makes you look at things from a different aspects when results like this happen.
Before Cheltenham there's obviously small signs that problems could arise but once the dust settles you can now clearly see we have a bigger problem on our hands if we want to get anywhere near competitive for next year.
The fact lies though, of course the English are good enough, everyone goes through an off patch, just look at Liverpool in the Premier League.
You can't consistently be at the top of your game all the time, but if things such as the dominance at the Festival don't lead to changes, then no-one would improve, and we would be back in the same position again next year.
In every other sport we always compete, no matter what the case, the horse racing situation though just asks the question as to whether we are running horse racing in this country in the right way?
Do we need to up the competition a bit more?
I think we need to up the incentive a bit more, more prize money means more trainers wanting the enter races and try and win them.
But yes I think we need to up the competition.
Today we only had two jumps meetings in Britain, one up at Carlisle and one down in Wales at Chepstow.
In Ireland they only had one at Downpatrick and tomorrow they only have one at Navan tomorrow, whilst we have three.
We can't help the fact though that we have more racecourses than in Ireland, we are much bigger after all, so I think the prize money route would be a good starting point to get things back on track for Cheltenham 2022.
Whatever happens though, we've got to put all this behind us now and get back to doing what we do best, winning!
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