A placing on the Each-Way pick and a win for the Pick of the Day?

TIME TO SOUND THE VICTORY TUNE!

Deadset, that’s Crazy Craig’s best performance since Golden Slipper Day, which should tell you how awful both the Crazies have been travelling since then.

So before I go into detail, I think the theme of the day was that Jamie Kah has well and truly shot herself in the face, given she partied her way out of 4 winners today, including Behemoth in the Group 1 Memsie, all up losing about $40,000 in earnings, and conversely, after looking like he was absolute toast as a jockey as recently as last year, Brett Prebble is back in town.

Apparently the win on Behemoth was his first Group 1 win in Australia since Wandjina won the Australian Guineas in 2015, and it’s easily the high point for Prebble since came back to Australia in 2018 after the wild successes in Hong Kong for the best part of 15 years, because he didn’t ride many winners for the ensuing 2 years, then he missed most of last season due to injury, so he teamed up with a new manager, started riding for Lindsey Smith, rode a heap of winners in the country, gets back in favour with a few trainers & owners as a flow-on effect, and that led to him picking up Behemoth after Jamie’s Jockey Jaunt came to light.

And we should mention Linda Meech got Kah’s ride on He’s A Balter in Race 2, which gave Meech her first ride back at Caulfield in 18 months, in which time she’d been on maternity leave and made a comeback to riding, an occasion that ended with He’s A Balter winning at 17-1….

And for absolutely no reason, he’s the replay of Masked Crusader in The Heath, doing something that a certain grey horse in those silks trained by the Hawkes family had a habit of doing.

Each Way Pick of the Day: Zakat in Race 8 at Kembla Grange – 3rd ($2.30 the place)

Just watch this if you want to see a horse perform better than Golden Slipper winner Stay Inside:

Sitting next to Mr Alfonse while watching the race, we were certain Zakat had bolted home from the rear to just miss 3rd from Tycoonist, because looking at this angle, you’d have no idea how the judge found a margin after some 5 minutes of trying:

It must be that notoriously dodgy Kembla camera angle that got Zakat over the line to complete the trifecta, and return a dividend for the Each-Way Pick of the Day for the first time in about 2 months.

So on that note, what noise does ZAKAT make?

MEOW!

Pick of the Day: Ayrton in Race 9 at Caulfield – WINNER ($1.75)

He was $2.15 when Crazy Craig landed him as the Pick of the Day yesterday afternoon, and by the jump Ayrton was into $1.75 and pretty much the only horse in single figures, which I assumed was in part due to a few scratchings that had moved the market, but it turned out there were no deductions, so anyone who got more than 2/1 for Ayrton (Like me) was pissing themselves laughing after the correct weight was declared.

Anyway, after two of the real good things of the day at Caulfield in Masked Crusader and Probabeel had saluted earlier in the afternoon, Ayrton was the anchor multi leg of the entire nation, and it was always comfortable watching John Allen steer him around The Heath, even with King Magnus finishing within half a length, in what was a nigh-on perfect 1st Up run for the horse sharing the same name as a Brazilian Formula One World Champion.

Ayrton was also the fourth and final winner that Jamie Kah DIDN’T get to ride today, with Allen also picking up the vacant ride on Bruckner in the McNeil Stakes, who only just scraped past the finishing line ahead of a flying Artorius.

Anyway, Ayrton is well on his way to the Golden Eagle.