Good morning from Newmarket. A terrific day of racing lies ahead on both sides of the Irish Sea, with the St Leger taking centre stage at Doncaster and Irish Champions weekend getting underway at Leopardstown.
Our interest today is confied to a slightly less exalted company, but it is exciting to be heading to Lingfield with a pair of interesting runners nonetheless.
Our first hopeful is the Gleneagles filly Lover’s Gait, who takes her chance in the two-year-old fillies’ novice over seven and a half-furlongs at 2.50. A well-related and attractive sort, she failed to do herself justice on her Newmarket debut six weeks ago and we are hoping to see more this afternoon. She has been ridden at home recently by Adrian McCarthy and they maintain the partnership on the track today. There are several in this with decent form and we realistically have a lot to find, but it would be nice to think that she can take a step forward from her debut.
Our second runner Annexation, who goes in the seven and a half-furlong 0-65 handicap at 3.25, has much more pressing claims on paper. Unraced at two, this son of Wootton Bassett made good progress in novice company earlier in the year, and then looked a tad unfortunate not to get off the mark on handicap debut at Ayr in July. We rushed him back to the trackjust five days later, over this course and distance actually, but a combination of rain softened ground and probable fatigue from Ayr just took the edge off him.
He was still a respectable third that day and has been freshened up since. We are still learning about him, so it is hard to gauge exactly how fair – or otherwise – his mark of 63 actually is. Still, he seems in good form, should have no trouble with conditions, and we have found an open looking contest. We are enduring a fairly lean spell just now, so it is difficult to be confident, but hopefully Annexation can run with credit. Kieran Shoemark will be doing the steering.
All the best,
Ed.