By Michael Guerin
A pair of group one performers who burned punters last week get the perfect chance to redeem themselves at Cambridge tomorrow.
The club’s Christmas Eve meeting hosts two group two events, the first for the sprinting trotters, the other mixing the four and five-year-old pacers, with some of those racing for more than just stake money.
Both have favourites — Marcoola (trot) and Chase The Dream (Futurity) — who gave punters a blood nose at Alexandra Park last Friday.
Chase The Dream was heavily backed in the Franklin Cup but blew his first standing start so should relish the return to a mobile 2700m tomorrow.
“It was a shame he galloped last week but he has come up well and has been working well so back to the mobile he is going to be very hard to beat,” said trainer-driver Mark Purdon.
While the race brings together a mixture four and five-year-olds, the four four-year-olds are all competing for an automatic invite to the A$200,000 Chariots Of Fire in Sydney on February 11, a race Purdon says Chase The Dream would be set for should he win tomorrow.
The same would probably apply for second favourite Franco Cristiano if he won tomorrow and while he has the ability to do that his lack of gate speed could see him settle behind key rivals like Chase The Dream and Rocker Band, making his task more difficult than his draw suggests.
Rocker Band returns to the track where she won the Jewels and will find this marginally easier than chasing Dream About Me at Alexandra Park the last two Fridays so looks a good quinella hope.
Marcoola will be red hot for the $50,000 Trotters Mile but also goes into the race owing punters plenty, albeit through no fault of his own.
He sulky tyre was flattened early in last Friday’s Lyell Creek at Alexandra Park and he did a big job to still finish fourth in near national record time.
Marcoola is the best drawn of the big names and has some gate speed so if he could run to the lead the race would seem as good as over after his huge recent win at Methven and pushing Monbet to a head in the NZ Free-For-All three starts ago.
But Lyell Creek winner Sunny Ruby has high gate speed and new trainer David Butcher says he will be using it, even though the Cambridge mile start makes it hard to cross to the lead from wide draws.
“A lot depends on how fast the mobile gate is going, if it is really humming it will be hard to get across them,” said Butcher.
“But she has to go forward and the way she won last week if she gets to the markers she is going to be hard again.” It is brutally hard to come from back in the field in Cambridge mile races so those on the speed should dominate the race, with Idle
Bones having had enough sprint racing to suggest she too could be blazing forward from out wide and have an upset hope.
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