OLVESTON-born Paul Nicholls believes changes to racing’s agenda in 2013, where novice and maiden chases were cut in a bid to avoid small fields, is still not working three years on.

The British Horse Authority decided to change the rules due to the fields which could compromise just a handful of horses.

Nicholls, who won the Champion Chase at last year’s Cheltenham Festival with Dodging Bullets, says he has horses left without races and, in turn, means he has less winners. It is a big frustration for the South Gloucestershire training legend.

Speaking in The Big Read in last Sunday's Racing Post newspaper, Nicholls said: "I've always been a novice chase man, won loads and loads of novice chases, and now a large proportion of those novice chases are novice handicaps, so I've got nothing to run in them, they're all rated too high.”

Nicholls’ lack of successes has been noticed in racing circles during December, but he said it was no fault of his own, saying the rating system is counter-productive to getting winners.

"That will now go against me, but it's just the way it is. Imagine if you had a yard full of novice hurdlers and you couldn't run them.

"In Ireland, you have to have three runs over fences before you get a handicap mark, that's why there's big fields in the novice chases. If they did that over here, you'd solve the problem of small fields in those races and you'd give horses a chance.

"I've some lovely horses who've done really well, but now it makes me think that you don't want those young horses to get too exaggerated a mark over hurdles because it'll hamper their prospects as novice chasers, which is sad, really. Not what it's all about.

"All I ever hear is ‘it's all right for you, you've got all those lovely horses', but it's not all right if I've got nowhere to run them. I'm never going to train the winners I once did because the opportunities aren't there."