Rain's not a pain

It was a bit of a disappointing week in hindsight. We had plenty of raiders at Yarmouth's three-day festival and they all ran with credit - Sancho Panza (2nd), Exopuntia (3rd) and Marafong (3rd) all ran up to standard and it was just a bit gutting not to get a winner out of those lot.
It's helping a lot of my horses at the moment that the ground is soft at most courses because I've got a handful of runners who have all been waiting for some juice in the ground and now we've got it, they're running into the money.
Soft ground also means though that I've had to give some a break. Emma's Gift is on a holiday in the field as her preferred firm ground is sparse. Khajaaly is in the field as well, just for a few weeks, to freshen him up and get that spark back into him which he has been lacking in recent runs.
We also had Generous Genella running at Newmarket on Friday in a hot maiden but we needed to get another run into her and it also coincided with her owner's birthday celebrations at the track - I won't tell you which birthday Anna was celebrating! Genella has always gone well at home and I'm adamant that she is above-average but at the minute she's just a bit weak and when she fills her frame, she will do us justice. The only positive at the minute is that because she is finishing down the field, she will have a really competitive handicap mark for next season.

I've got half a dozen runners this week and they should all be in with a shout. Blackmore on Thursday at Wolverhampton will be an interesting one as it's his first run for us since we bought him off Roger Charlton in July. He came to us with a reputation for being unruly but since we've had him (and castrated him) there's been no problems. We had a nice surprise with him too as we were told by Mr Charlton that Blackmore would need a stalls test before he ran again so we booked it for Newmarket on Saturday but then the starter rang up and said he didn't need one - he was just on a warning. That was great but we have put him in the stalls at home anyway and he's given no worries - he's pretty quick out of the gates, in fact.