A potentially vintage edition of one of the world's great sprints, the Lightning Stakes, is set to go at Flemington this Saturday.
This is clearly an outstanding race - you can count on one hand the number of races with more top-end depth in the last decade - and I wrote words to that effect for page three of the Sporting Guide this week; so I won't repeat myself here. Suffice to say it promises to be one hell of a spectacle. Probably more so than a betting race for the price of having such established top end talent is that they are well established in the market place as well. Eduardo could squeeze in a bit tigher to his old sparring parter Nature Strip but the Melbourne Mail heads elsewhere in search of more interesting opportunities.
A vintage edition of the Lightning is preceded by a not-so-vintage edition of The Vanity, on paper at least, but a thin race for established form (only two of the eleven have run in Group races and one of those, Ancient Girl, was 20/1 and soundly beaten) isn't a thin race for betting with seven last-start winners lining up.
Those seven last-start winners are joined by three placegetters and the Group One-placed Barb Raider; so there is a bit going on.
A few observant punters will have noticed that the Maher and Eustace stable have developed a little knack of training an absolute ton of winners - 313 of them in the past 12 months at last count.
John Allen has been on for 64 of them, striking at 23% and returning punters around 1.2 winners for every one they (politely) ask for which is slightly better than the stable without him. Allen's impact with the stable is up there with the best in the country. Waller and J-Mac areas.
The stable saddles race favourite Socialist on Saturday but she goes without the services of Allen. Instead she has to cope with carrying Jamie Kah, but all is not lost! Kah happens to ride a stack of winners with ruthless efficiency herself.
Stables are aware of this and Kah lands on a string of leading chances as a resul which is well described by a post-carnival impact value of 1.89. The market, of course, is on to this and Kah is well fancied wherever she goes but her impact with Maher and Eustace, good as it is, is not quite as good in terms of winners as their combination with Allen.
Adjusting strike-rates for sample size, and the expected strike-rate of the jockey more generally, we see Allen come out a few points higher than Kah with the stable. Socialist may be favourite but is it that Cardigan Queen, Allen's Vanity mount, is in fact the stable favourite?
Who knows. And who really cares. But Allen is a big tick and he goes aboard Cardigan Queen who ripped home in terrific late splits to win first up at Sandown with form that ties her right in here. A step forward in fitness, and under Allen, has her looking just as likely as Socialist nd a good bet around $6.00 in early markets.
The Talindert market, like the two-year-old scene overall, is very flat and lacking for a standout. It's up for grabs and one with potential to step forward and grab it is the Hawkes-trained Lambda.
She arrives seven weeks on from a debut where she settled back in a small field that crawled up the Flemington straight. Splits show Lambda not really getting organised until very late on, matching the race winner Latizia in the last section to grab third.
The winner then measured up well in the fairly fast Fillies Preview which is one of the key form references on offer here.
The bar doesn't look a high one, and $26 seems compensation enough for the fact that she remains a largely unknown proposition.
THE MELBOURNE MAIL
Bet Of The Day: Race 5 # 1 Cardigan Queen @ $6.00
Each Way Play: Race 4 #13 Lambda @ $26.00
