William Haggas critical of champion jockey Oisin Murphy

Speaking on Racing TV's Luck On Sunday show following Saturday's QIPCO British Champions Day at Ascot where Murphy was crowned champion jockey for a fifth time in his career, the Newmarket trainer made his feelings clear.

Haggas said: "I don't really know him very well, to be fair, I had lunch with him in Cape Town in January and I thought he was a perfectly normal person, but a lot of his life is not normal.

"He is an outstanding rider, but he's got away with blue murder on the racecourse for a while and he's a complicated soul, unfortunately.

"But his talent as a rider... there is no doubt, he is the best around.

"There was an example and it really, really upset me. I've been upset over the last few years with the professional foul that jockeys do, that sort of leaning across a horse and then pulling the stick through, then going to win by a length.

"If you're on a bicycle, in a bicycle race, and you have to stop suddenly, you can't actually get going again. The horse goes on to win by a length and they said it's won too easily (to reverse the placings), and the jockeys know, and they do it a lot.

"The incident with Corinth (trained by John and Thady Gosden, ridden by Murphy) at Sandown, I thought he deliberately - personally, and I'm going to get into tricky water here - deliberately made sure that Harry Davies (rider of second-past-the-post Loz Vegas, later promoted to first) didn't win that race.

"It got taken off him, but to say that was accidental is complete and utter madness I think. And we have to step on this sort of thing because that, in my opinion, bordering on dangerous. If he'd come down and gone to hospital they'd have made a song and dance of it.

"That is not the way to be riding from our champion jockey.

"I know he probably won't speak to me ever again which is fair enough, but that's not his fault - he's been allowed to get away with it and that is something I think that Stewards should be looking at more closely. That has been allowed to get worse in recent years."

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