York Ebor Festival

21/8/17

It was a quiet week just passed but that’s all set to change with the York Ebor Festival beginning on Wednesday which I’ll be covering daily from Tuesday afternoon and we already have a couple of ante-positions in the Great Voltigeur and Ebor. Given that I have already covered Saturday’s big race, the Ebor, there will be no Ante-Post Focus this week. Horses to Follow returns on Thursday and Mustashry was a nice winner for us last week for that column.

It’s looking like being an above-average Juddmonte, Yorkshire Oaks and Nunthorpe so we can have no complaints at present at the quality of the three Group 1s and the two-year-old races are also shaping up nicely. As for the handicaps, I fared better in those at Glorious Goodwood than I expected finding a couple of nice-priced Mark Johnston-trained winners and the equivalent events will also be ferociously competitive on the Knavesmire. Find a couple of winners in the handicaps this week and we’re laughing. Luca Cumani in the handicaps (and 3yos in the all-aged handicaps), Willie Haggas in the two-year-olds races and Kevin Ryan in the sprints hasn’t been a bad way to go at the meeting over the last decade.

Ciaran Meagher returns on Tuesday to cover the Northern Trust Open, the first of four events that he’ll be covering for us in as many weeks as part of the FedEx Cup play-offs and Carl Redden will be on duty at the weekend with his outright preview of the US Open tennis before overseeing the fortnight for us on a round by round basis into September.

Two out of three in Premier League Picks this weekend with only Tottenham letting us down. I attended the game and felt that Spurs were the better side but Chelsea were well organised and made them pay for not converting their chances. It was evident beforehand that the Spurs marketing team were trying to make Wembley as close to a home from home as possible, even attempting to emulate Barcelona in the lead up to the game with flags for everyone but the drum beat over their public address system during the game to artificially try to create an atmosphere when it went quiet just didn’t work at all. It’s not an ice hockey game boys! Manchester City v Everton should be a good one tonight and I’ll return on Friday looking ahead at this weekend’s games.