Our timefigure guru Graeme North analyses the big action from last week in Ireland and England.
There wasn’t a lot happening domestically last week, so I’ll concentrate on the action from Ireland where the first pattern event took place at Leopardstown on Thursday night and saw Diego Velazguez return to winning ways in the Group 3 Meld Stakes.
On the face of things this was a very smart performance commensurate with the promise he’d shown not only in his first two races at two years but also in the French 2000 on his reappearance, and a 116 timefigure might be cited as further ‘evidence’ his performance was pretty much as good as it looked. There’s no doubt that Diego Velazguez was the best horse in the race and would surely have won handsomely anyway had he taken the path followed by most of the others but right from the start Ryan Moore was notably keen to keep him wide of the more churned up ground on the inside some earlier winners had taken despite the much longer route he was taking.
Chris Hayes on eventual runner-up Tarawa got the message swinging wide off the home turn that the inside rail might not be the place to be, bizarrely given he’d come wide when winning an earlier race, but all that did was force Diego Velazguez wider onto what looked an even faster strip he had to himself. A literal reading of his seven-length win has all those behind the winner running a long way below form which is usually an indication in itself something is afoot and had I the ability to return timefigures with symbols attached to them, such as those that accompany Timeform ratings, I’d have probably elected for 116? In this instance.
