A recent run of winners has a couple of familiar names, Freedman and Hayes, back in the headlines.

David Hayes has set himself up with son-in-law Tom Dabernig and Lee Freedman has re-joined brother Anthony to create a pair of formidable training partnerships, and so far things are going well.

In their short time officially together Hayes and Dabernig are producing 0.94 winners for every market-expected winner.

That may sit below market expectation but it sits above what we can call ‘par’ given that we are using industry SP and haven’t scaled it back to 100%.

In others words we are using a market that expects more winners than there are to go around.

A figure around the 0.90 mark could be considered par, when factoring that in.

The Freedman brothers, meanwhile, have produced an outstanding 1.23 winners per expected winner since teaming up this season.

Excitement here is obviously tempered here by the fact we are dealing with fairly small sample sizes - particularly in the case of Anthony and Lee – and the current numbers only really point to short term trends.

From a punting perspective short term trends are little more than just a bit of trivia as we tend not to notice them until they have happened and by then it is all to late. As stats folk would say, these short term trends aren’t predictive, and therefore they are of little value.

However, in the case of the Freedman brothers we can use the significant sample size of their previous body of work to point towards where this short term trend is likely to head.

In the two decades prior to Lee handing the reigns solely to Anthony there were over 2300 winners trained by the “FBI” with 0.97 winners coming for every one expected by the market.

Basically, the Freedman Brothers are way above average, and while the current run of 1.23 winners per expected winner should prove unsustainable in the long-term they should continue to be a stable to look upon favourably.

Another interesting point to consider is the impact of Lee and the partnership on this short term trend.

A quick fire run of winners may have been on the cards whether Lee returned to the fold or not, the stable was hardly on it’s knees while Lee was away.

Anthony trained 230 winners in his own name, was successful at Group 1 level with Mawingo, and perhaps unlucky not to have had more success given the best horse he trained in his time in charge – at least according to Timeform – Lucas Cranach, went amiss when much was expected of him.

That said, Lee returned winners at a better rate against expectation over the long term.

Anthony’s 230 winners returned 0.86 of those that the market expected from him, so we could have expected Lee to have a positive impact of something like 0.11 winners per expected winner on re-joining the team.

Long term rival David Hayes came into this season off a well-publicised dry spell which – surely not by coincidence – came about as the operation moved from the famed Lindsay Park to a new training base at Euroa.

In the time from the last Hayes-trained Group 1 winner Eagle Falls to the start of the current season, and the partnership with Dabernig, the stable’s 401 winners were a mere 0.71 percent of what the market expected.

The 0.94 winners per winners expected this season is well up on that mark.

Importantly that 0.94 comes from over 600 runners and is looking more and more like Hayes and Dabernig settling in to their new surrounds than just a bit of short term noise.

Next step, a return to training winners at the top level, and that may not be far away given the promising horses we have seen step out from Euroa in the late summer.