Racing Insights, Monday 12/06/23
The pace tab on our racecards helps to make a reasoned assumption based upon a field's most recent runs as to how their next race might unfold. This information is vastly under-used by UK bettors, but we feel it's that important that we make this info totally free for all races every Sunday & Monday.
This, of course, includes our daily free races, which for Monday are...
- 4.30 Lingfield
- 7.00 Pontefract
- 7.30 Pontefract
- 8.10 Windsor
- 8.40 Windsor
...and on paper, if nothing else, the first of our two Yorkshire races looks the best of the five freebies, so I'm heading about 40 miles East of my house for the 7.00 Pontefract, a 9-runner, Class 3, 4yo+ flat handicap over a left handed mile and a half on good to firm ground...
The top two in the weights, Matchless and La Pulga both won last time out, as did Carrilgillihy, whilst only Real Terms, Glasses Up and Hezmie are winless in five or more.
None of the field raced at Class 3 LTO, with only top weight Matchless dropping in class. His eight rivals are all up one or two classes here with Carrilgillihy, Cmon Kenny and the out of form Hezmie the ones moving up from Class 5.
Carrilgillihy is the only one to have won at Ponty before and he's 4 from 4 at the tack including 3 over course and distance. Matchless, Zealandia and Real terms have at least won ove rthe trip before now.
The entire field have raced in the last four weeks with La Pulga rested for just four days after a convincing win over 1m5f at Hamilton last week and we've no new headgear/equipment etc to discuss. In fact, Zealandia wears cheekpieces for the third time and he's the only with any headgear in a field that, according to Instant Expert, contains half a dozen good to firm winners and just three former Class 3 victors...
Although there's not a great deal of green there, the only real worry is that 2/20 Class 3 record for Glasses Up. Mind you, he is on a 23-rce losing strak, so he's unlikely to be a player here over a track/trip that doesn't have as big a draw bias as you'd initially think...
Stall 5 has done particularly (but anomalously) well, but and draw in the first seven stalls would be fine. This, of course, isn't great news for Zealandia & Matchless and it's the lower half of the draw (1-5) that have filled the places most often, but here at Ponty, feature of the day, PACE, often rules the race and from those races above...
...and although hold-up horses have almost won their fair share of races, the front half of the pack is where you'd want to be and based on this field's recent running styles, this is where I'd draw my line on PACE...
And when we combine both pace and draw stats and put them on our heat map, we get...
Summary
From the above data, it's Carrigillihy for me here today. He won last time out and is only up 3lbs, he's 4 from 4 here (inc 3 at C&D) and shows up best on pace/draw. He's currently 7/1 with a few firms and that looks massive and could even be an E/W option, especially with Sky who are paying four places again.
As for the places, they could well go to La Pulga (10/3 fav) and Matchless (13/2), the latter would be shorter if he had a better draw, having won LTO but now dropping in class, he could be dangerous here.
Other Recent Posts by This Author:
- Tix Picks, Wednesday 04/12/24
- Tix Picks, Tuesday 03/12/24
- Tix Picks, Monday 02/12/24
- Tix Picks, Saturday 30/11/24
- Tix Picks, Thursday 28/11/24
