Dick Turpin - highway robbery

In today’s blog:
Review of yesterday’s Racing
Today’s Racing Selections
World Cup

Review of yesterday’s Racing
No selections posted on the blog yesterday (it being a Sunday) but what a great result from France with Richard Hannon’s DICK TURPIN confirming the superiority of the English “milers” in taking the Group 1 Prix Jean Prat at Chantilly from a top-quality field - including French Guineas and Derby winner Lope De Vega - at the generous odds of 5/1. It was probably asking a lot of Lope De Vega to drop back to a mile from the 10½-furlongs of the French Derby trip. What the result confirmed was that CANFORD CLIFFS is a very talented miler – probably one of the best we’ve seen in recent years – as Hannon thinks he is clearly superior to DICK TURPIN. The form of yesterday’s race in which Hearts Of Fire (4th) and Siyouni (2nd) re-opposed DICK TURPIN when read in conjunction with the St James Palace Stakes at Royal Ascot confirms that there were no “hard luck” stories at Royal Ascot.

Today’s Racing Selections
We know that summer is here when we have the July Meeting at Newmarket. Its 3 weeks since Royal Ascot so we can expect to see many of those that raced there, racing again this week. Trainers in form is the way to go at the height of summer and paying attention to those trainers sending just a single runner to the track on any given day can be very lucrative. For instance, Jeremy Noseda sent out just Group Therapy (2nd @ 3/1) on Saturday but followed that up on Sunday with a 5/4 winner from his only runner at Brighton where he has now had 14 winners from just 27 runners in the past 5 years. Today, he sends just SQUALL to Ripon (where he’s had only 6 runners in the past 5 years) for the 9:20. There are meetings on the flat today at Bath and this evening at Ripon and Windsor. Nothing jumps out of the card at Bath, though Sir Mark Prescott’s only runner today COMEDY ACT will be hard to beat – but I don’t really like races with fewer than 6 runners, and there’s only 4 in this. At Ripon, the final race at 9:20 is an interesting 3yo maiden as, along with Noseda, Saeed Bin Suroor sends his only runner today, MUREB, all the way from Newmarket. There is also the interesting BROADWAY DANCER from Richard Fahey’s stable making its debut in the race. Her dam is a half-sister to the outstanding Arazi, and Broadway Dancer is her 1st foal.
At Windsor, there is also an interesting 3yo maiden at 8:40 with single stable runners from Stoute (ENTITLED) and Gosden (FUN AFFAIR). However, the race that I will be watching with interest is the 7:40, a 5f class 4 handicap with the well handicapped DESERT POPPY making her 3yo debut. She could be a lot better than her OR76 rating, and 11/2 is fair but I’d be happier taking 6/1 plus.

So, no wagers today though if you can get 6/1 plus about DESERT POPPY in the Windsor 7:40 then I’d wager 1pt ew.

World Cup
Brazil is beaten at the Quarter-Final stage and their manager Dunga gets the sack! It’s a hard world in international football. This time last week, the focus was on the “domination” of the World Cup by the South American countries; today there is just Uruguay left in (after a despicable hand-ball incident prevented Ghana from winning) after Argentina and Paraguay were knocked-out along with Brazil. A small consolation for this blog was the success of the Netherlands team who are now in the Semi-Final meeting Germany. If you look back to the blog of 21st June, I wrote “given that so many teams are playing so poorly, the Netherlands at 9/1 (Hills) look good value”. How right that looks now! Today, they are just 9/4 to lift the trophy.

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