Monday gives us three meetings and twelve horses, and the first thing worth saying is that only one of them is shorter than 4/1. That is not a complaint. When a card fills up with genuinely competitive handicaps rather than one-sided novice events, the prices come to you. Today the prices have come to us in bulk.
Ayr is where the day starts and where most of the work gets done. Five picks across the afternoon, from the 3:15 through to the 5:15, and the shortest of them is 8.0. That tells you what sort of racing Scotland is putting on this afternoon. Big fields, tight marks, nobody standing out on paper.
Ceinture d’Orion in the 4:45 is the one we keep coming back to. The recent form line reads worse than the runs deserve because she has met trouble more than once, and horses who keep getting stopped tend to look worse on paper than they are on the track. She has the trip, she has the ground, the handicapper is coming back towards her, and Tudhope round Ayr is about as good a combination as you will find in the north.
Kempton has three under the lights, and Ghost Story in the 4:30 has the shape of a horse who wins one of these. Placed in four of her last five over this exact trip and surface, which is the sort of consistency that eventually converts. Butler does well here and a mark of 65 looks like the point where she gets her head in front rather than just chasing it home.
Windsor closes the evening out and it is the meeting we have leaned on hardest. Four picks, all around the 5.0 to 6.0 mark, with Trefor in the 7:15 carrying the biggest stake of the day. That is a rare thing for us on a card like this, so take it as read that we are not hedging on that one.
Yesterday was quiet. Two picks, no winners, though Al Maslool got us a placed return at 3.25 which softens the landing. Short cards do that. You get fewer swings at it and the variance does what it wants.
The two we will be watching with most interest are the ones nobody else will be. Lightning Galaxy at 34.0 in the Ayr 4:15 and Allaboutthelunch at 41.0 in the Kempton 3:30 are both there on small stakes for obvious reasons, but prices like that only need to land occasionally to pay for a lot of quiet Mondays. Windsor is where the day gets decided either way.