Sorry, but it works fine at my end. I just added a button to a blank worksheet that called LoadRaceField(ActiveSheet) on being pressed, changed the xml address from cell E-whatever to a string and added a reference Microsoft XML v6.0 (which I presume you've done, as it would've fallen over much earlier).

Code ran through and wrote the odds for the race onto the worksheet; no problems.

If it's still not working for you, maybe upload the whole workbook someplace else and I can have a look to whatever is unique to your situation. ...you haven't done something silly and defined your own function/subroutine called Item, have you?