Hawwaam accelerated best off a slow pace to easily win the Grade 1 Daily News at Greyville over 2000m. Twist of Fate tried hard but could not go with the star colt who produced a 24.8 second closing burst from the top of the straight.
Speed figures wouldn’t work here given that the sluggish pace for much of the race affected the final time. However, Hawwaam’s previous bests of 113 and 116 confirm his superiority over Twist of Fate who has twice run 109’s and was comprehensively beaten here by around two lengths. No disgrace in that – Mike de Kock’s Hawwaam is an outstanding thoroughbred.
In contrast to the race shape of the Daily News, the G1 Woolavington winner, Silvano’s Pride labored through a final fraction of 26.3 after dictating a stronger earlier gallop. Front and Centre suffered a tough beat after lugging in right across the width of the course. She closed in 25.5 seconds with that ziggy- zaggy route she took costing her the race.
Sean Tarry has a knack of getting his horses to produce on big days. Liege, who won the Summer Cup in November 2017 off a merit rating of 99 and has not troubled the judge since being raised even higher than that, suddenly woke up to lift the G3 Lonsdale Stirrup Cup off a reduced official rating of 95. He closed in 25.3 seconds to continue the excellent run of success that Tarry is experiencing.
Predicting the ebbs and flows in form cycles is at the heart of this brain game. Change is something punters need to anticipate as it is rare for things to stay the same in such a dynamic game. Horses only repeat their previous level of ability about a third of the time – they are far more likely to be either improving or regressing than staying at the same standard.
With the physical condition of horses in a continual state of flux and race circumstances ever-changing, our big challenge as horseplayers is to peek into the future and make predictions, not expect history just to repeat itself. Labelling Hawwaam was obvious – finding Liege or Silvano’s Pride required more fertile imagination!