SANDOWN

15:00

Bless Him

As I often say about Bless Him, he really does want a straight track to be at his optimum – his Ascot record tells you that – so the 1m here is not ideal, as he likes a good pace to aim at, coming through horses. And, of course, we also have loads to find with the unpenalised Palace Pier, and Khuzaam looked very good at Lingfield when beating us by a wide margin last time. But my horse did run very well there considering he couldn’t have asked for a worse set-up than a wide draw around a bend at that track, so in the circumstances I thought he ran well. Third is realistically the best we can hope for here, I would have thought – we would take the 7k for that now and move on – but he has his ground and some of his best races have come in small fields. We have all seen bigger shocks, I suppose.