Good morning from Newmarket. It was encouraging to see a couple of better performances from our runners yesterday, and hopefully we can continue to trend in the right direction with our representatives at Lingfield this evening.
We get underway with the debutant Red For All in the seven and a half furlong two-year-old novice. A half-brother to our three-year-old handicapper Global Express, his other siblings include the high-class juvenile Misheer, who won the Cherry Hinton and was second in the Cheveley Park back in 2009.
Now, it will clearly be asking an awful lot for him to emulate those sort of achievements! However, this lad has been coming along at home lately and is now ready for his first taste of racecourse action.
His sire Muhaarar was a brilliantly explosive sprinter, but he has had a relatively mixed start with his first-crop runners this season. They took a little while to get going, but are now starting to come good over seven-furlongs, and Unforgetable was Gr.3 placed for the sire over that distance recently. It seems that they simply require a bit more time and distance than one might have initially anticipated, and such comments definitely apply to Red For All. He will naturally improve plenty for the run, but it will be interesting to see how he gets on and good to get him started. Hollie Doyle takes the ride.
Our second runner Foad is another two-year-old, but he is a little further along in his development. He has had three runs to date, and makes his handicap debut in the six-furlong 0-60 nursery at 7.15.
He showed a good deal of promise on his debut at Leicester when finishing fifth, but did not achieve much in two subsequent runs at Nottingham and Haydock. We have been left scratching our heads a little as we thought he was capable of a bit more than he has been showing, but now we are in handicaps from a rating of 59 hopefully he can find his feet.
We reach for a pair of blinkers to see if they can help him rediscover that early season zip he was showing, and hopefully he will have no trouble coping with conditions. This is a competitive race for its type, but it will still be disappointing if he cannot be involved at the business end down at this sort of level. Jim Crowley gets aboard for the first time.
All the best,
Ed.