Stat of the Day, 14th February 2015

Stat of the Day

Stat of the Day, 14th February 2015

The Wadham / Aspell / Fakenham combination bore fruit for us in great style yesterday, as Canuspotit absolutely routed the field with his nearest challenger some 27 lengths adrift.

He travelled supremely well throughout the contest and apart from brushing through the top of the final fence, jumped really well indeed. It’s always nice to cheer on a winner, but even more satisfying to see your runner pull away from the pack with relative ease. The cherry upon the icing on the cake came when we collected 3pts profit from a 7/4 favourite.

In what has been an up and down sort of week, I’d love to end it with another winner and although Saturday’s cards haven’t given me much to work with stats-wise, I’m hopeful of success in the…

3.45 Lingfield:

Where David Probert rides the 5 yr old Melvin The Grate for Andrew Balding in this 1m, Class 2 handicap contest on the A/W and his current odds are 7/2 BOG.

You can follow the trainer blindly…

…on the All-Weather. Well, as far back as 2008, anyway! Since then he’s had 184 winners from 1160 runners on the A/W with a decent strike rate of 15.9%. Sticking a tenner on each of them would have seen you make £1563 profit at an ROI of 13.5%, which is pretty good from blind backing, although we’d prefer a higher level of return, of course!

Here at Lingfield, the figures are slightly better, with 56 winners from 333 (16.8% SR) for 48.4pts profit (+14.5% ROI) and more recently (ie since New Year’s Day 2013) the record is 27/149 (18.1% SR) for 89.1pts (+59.8% ROI) profit.

Incidentally, Andrew’s record in A/W handicaps here at Lingfield with runners priced from Evens to 4/1 is 18/48 (37.5% SR) for 13.8pts (+28.8% ROI).

We’re likely to go off as favourite…

David Probert seems to have a good record on A/W handicap favourites, though. Especially those in that Evens to 4/1 banding, where he is 21/61 (34.4% SR) for 10.5pts (+17.2% ROI) profit.

And David rides Andrew’s horses with some success…

Since 2008, the partnership has had 219 winners from 1278 races (17.1% SR), generating level stakes profits of 387.6pts at an ROI of 30.3% with an A/W record reading 80/436 (18.4% ROI) for 223.8pts (+51.3% ROI).

They do slightly better with horses running over trips of 6f to 12f, as seen by 77 winners from 407 (18.9% SR) for 246.8pts (+60.6% ROI).

And conditions look ideal for our selection…

Melvin The Grate might well have a career record of 5/19, which admittedly isn’t too shabby, but he is 4/7 (1136113) on the all-weather with a 313 record here at Lingfield with a win and a third placed finish under his belt from two efforts over course and distance.

He was originally trained by Andrew Balding, before joining the Murtagh yard for a spell early last year. It didn’t really work out for him, results were poor and back he came! Since his return to Kingsclere, something has clicked into place for Melvin The Grate with finishes of 21113 over today’s trip and a 1113 record under David Probert, so whatever they’re doing at home, it’s working!

The horse is 2/4 in Class 2 contests (113 in C2 A/W contests over this trip) and although he has never raced in the month of February before, he’s what I’d call a “winter horse”, since he is 5/10 in the October to March period, but 0/9 from April to September

If Melvin The Grate keeps on doing what he has been doing, I fully expect him to be in the shake-up at the end of the contest and I think we’ve a decent chance of collecting from our 7/2 BOG bet. I’m on with Hills for this one, but the price is on offer in several other places too, as you’ll see, if you…

…click here for the latest betting on the 3.45 Lingfield

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Here is today’s racecard.