Brekkie Crumbs (Notes from the NewsRadio Breakfast team) for Monday October 19th
Mark - Breakfast EP:……
Well I hope you heeded Helen Thomas and Max Presnell’s advice in this blog last week.
If you did, you should have a fat wallet this morning.
Two out of the three “Weekend Halftime at the Races” hosts tipped the Bart Cummings-trained “Viewed” to win the Caulfield Cup.
To be fair, Scott Wales’ tip, “Baughurst”, didn’t get a start.
But if you’d backed the powerful gelding in the race he DID appear in on Saturday, the Coongy Cup, you would have collected as well.
Back to the Caulfield Cup.
Wasn’t it interesting how the two big name international horses, Kiklees and Cima De Triomphe failed to fire?
They were widely tipped to take out the $2.5 million dollar race and were early favourites.
Even Victoria’s most high-profile racing analyst, Sport 927’s Deane Lester, was seduced by the prospect of a foreign affair, tipping Kirklees.
But the bookies obviously knew something.
For example on Friday afternoon, TAB Sportsbet was offering nutty promotions.
For ONE bet of up to $20, you’d get odds of $8 if EITHER Kirklees or Cima De Triomphe won.
Unheard of.
Why were they so confident those two horses wouldn’t win?
In fact high-profile Melbourne bookie Michael Eskander had branded the two overseas runners “a perfect lay” and said fellow bookies would be “mad” if they didn’t take on Cima De Triomphe and Kirklees.
This is what he told The Age newspaper on Friday:
”Just have a look at the figures. Punters always come for them and most of them get beaten,” he said. ”They’re a perfect lay. They’ve come halfway around the world and they’re competing on surfaces that are foreign to them and in a style of racing that is far more hectic than they are used to.”
”You get waves of stories about how good they are and that momentum builds up to a flood of money and so often it goes down the drain,” Eskander said. ”Sure, there’s been the odd time that they’ve been successful, but largely they’ve been a gift to bookmakers.
”You’ll find that the two overseas horses to win Caulfield Cups (”All the Good” last year at $41 and “Taufan’s Melody” in 1998 at $67) proved to be skinners starting at huge odds and giving us the best Caulfield Cup result in decades … I know they add another dimension to the race, but as far as gambling on them, you’ve got to take them on every time.”
And this is what crack Melbourne trainer Mark Kavanagh told ABC NewsRadio’s Weekend Halftime at the Races yesterday:
“Australians are actually the convict society aren’t they? And you know, anything that comes from the “Home” country or Europe is always perceived to be better. Anything that’s imported is always perceived to be better. And in this day and age, it’s not.”
“There’s no faster or pressurised racing than Australian racing and, you know, on faster and harder ground. It’s a totally different concept.”
Especially at a tight track like Caulfield, when you’re trying to fight off 17 other runners in heavy traffic over only 2400m.
International horses have a much better record in the Melbourne Cup at Flemington.
Longer distance, more roomy track, with a big, long straight.
But this year, I’ll be putting my money on the local starters.
And particularly anything with “J.B. Cummings” next to its name.
