Cuil Mhor v. Dali

The weather has indeed really come good (and looks set to stay lovely all week).  Even so, I think that we were correct to miss Windsor with Sussex Girl tonight.  The ground has dried out a lot, but even so it is probably just good ground or slightly softer, and definitely no firmer; while she would ideally, I believe, like proper fast ground, firmer than good.  It does, though, look lovely ground - and I so wish that we had been allowed to run So Much Water there.  I'm not sure where she can go instead, but I have entered Sussex Girl for a seven-furlong fillies' maiden at Goodwood on Saturday.  It would be good to run her at the end of the week as the ground should be fast everywhere after a few days of this lovely weather.

And it's always nice to go to Goodwood - even if the thought of contesting a maiden race which contains a horse with a three-figure rating is not a particularly appealing thought.  That doesn't happen very often because for a maiden to have a rating, he/she has to have run three times - and it is not often that a horse runs three (or more times) without winning a race while running well enough to earn a rating of 100 or more.  However, this race on Saturday contains a Richard Hannon-trained filly whose rating is 101.  You'd presume that she'll be something like a 1/10 shot if she runs - but I'd imagine that we'll run anyway.  If every time one entered a horse and then looked at the entries and decided that one would be unlikely to win it, one wouldn't have many runners at all.  All one can ever do is run and hope.

And that's what we'll be doing tomorrow with Roy (seen after work yesterday in the first two photographs) at Brighton and on Wednesday with Hope Is High (seen today in the fourth and fifth photographs, with Indira following her up Long Hill in the former) at Lingfield.  The drawer (if that makes sense) hasn't done us any favours again: Roy's stall one is the very worst for us (as he doesn't like being in the stalls for long - I've been wracking my brains to try to work out what to do about that without, so far, coming up with a satisfactory solution; so what I'll do now is bury my head in the sand and pretend that the problem is going to go away - which, of course, it won't - otherwise I wouldn't get any sleep tonight) while Hope Is High's 11 or 12 is the second worst draw we could have had (twelve, of course, being the only one worse).  She had a double-figure draw first-up too, and I feel that that cost her whatever chance of victory she had; so we've just got to hope that things can pan out a bit better this time.

There's plenty going on aside from the inconsequential trivialities in our little corner of the racing world; and a couple of incidents over the past week have caught my eye, making me feel that I ought to ruminate in this blog on the issues which they have thrown up.  However, that can wait.  I'm tired and I'd like to get to bed by 8.30 to keep me fresh for the two busy days ahead of us.  So what I'll do is keep things light-hearted. What better way of doing that than by mentioning the wry grin which spread across my face yesterday when I saw that Aidan O'Brien was running a horse called Dali at Naas?  That, to my mind, was too good to be true.  As I saw it, Coolmore naming a horse called Dali was never going to work, so I was not surprised when this horse started favourite and finished last.

However, Dali got me thinking.  How about Godolphin follow suit and name a horse Cuil Mhor?  Kinnaird, one of Newsells Park Stud's best broodmares, usually has a nice yearling in the October Sale, so John Ferguson could buy one of her children and he/she could be called Cuil Mhor.  (Look at your atlas of Great Britain if you can't follow that one).  That animal thus named could then be a perfect recruit for the Godolphin string.  And here's another good name for a Godolphin horse: Ballet D'Oeil.  The Darley broodmare band must still contain a few daughters of Nureyev.  Send one of them over to France to be covered by Vision D'Etat - and bob's your uncle!