Contact your milliners and book your caterer; it's Cup Day at Flemington!

Eight go in the feature, the Flemington Cup (a race with a big name and honoured by time), with the octet headlined by Through Irish Eyes who is the right favourite but vulnerable enough to make prices of $2.50 and shorter easy enough to leave alone. 

The Cup has been brought back to life to give stayers more options through the winter as the traditional Australian training method of sticking them out in the rain for a few months has slowly evolved to keeping horses fit and moving. 

It is safe to say that the race is not yet filling it's spring platform brief. Exemplar and The Good Fight have won the two run so far and while a couple among the small field this year might promise more than that pair it hardly looks a spring shaper. 

But it is a fine idea, and there might be a spring shaper elsewhere on the card. There can be little doubt about which is the race of the day. The seventh wears that honour well with a lovely blend of the fit and firing and those building towards peaks further down the line.  

Hezashocka, D'Aguilar and Mankayan are all up and about with winter wins to their name and look sure to go well again but the likes of Kipps and Interpretation look two getting all-important practice in ahead of the spring where they have the tools to play a part in better races than this. 

We're several lines into a tipping piece now without a tip and, for all of that, the race of the day doesn't throw up our bet of the day and so we move along to the next and the bet - Daytona Bay. 

On a day where most of the 'good' favourites are also fairly obvious and tight in the betting, Daytona Bay looks a 'good' favourite with the potential to be undersold.

Daytona Bay won his first two, rather unspectacularly it must be said, before finding a slow race at Caulfield where things got very messy through the middle stages. That race developed into a battle of late speed and Daytona Bay was as good as any in that speed battle; Arran Bay and Cardinal Gem doing about as well before going 1-2 in the Silver Bowl. 

That was a nice step forward and it hinted at another one with a stronger pace to run at. He surely gets that here and Jamie Kah goes on to make better use of him. Or at least we hope so. 

We can drop back to the race of the day for an each way speculator. The previously mentioned Kipps is priced up as a general $26 chance in early markets and may well trade at better prices given strong form at the front of the market and his failing to give his running last time.  

That run seems easy enough to forgive; heavy going at Sandown, staying at a mile, and in a race that took plenty of winning. 

Another month under the belt, up to 2000m, and back onto Flemington is the recipe for something different and his terrific Australian debut here showed that he is a horse with the right sort of talent to knock one of these off. 

As is the case with Daytona Bay, it's not that his price doesn't seem a reasonable assessment in the scenario but he is one that could be marked a lot differently had his opportunities been different.

THE MELBOURNE MAIL 

Bet Of The Day: Race 8 #7 Daytona Bay @ $3.60

Each Way Play: Race 7 #12 Kipps @ $26.00