3 minute read

Best bets for Cox Plate day at The Valley.

Looking to play over the sprint trips on Saturday where the ten-race card is of course headlined by the Cox Plate, for which you can find a full preview here.

For our other best bets, we'll kick off nice and early in the first where Katsu looks to have a class edge on his rivals over the 1000m in an open handicap field, scratched from a Group 2 last week due to the soft track.

He holds a peak R&S rating of 111 when first-up in December at Flemington in the Kensington Stakes, beating some sharp sprinters, and that sort of rating would see him win this more often than not.

He did fail at his only run off a short break in March but the expected rating given his short SP was 109 and the start prior the expected rating was 115 behind Queman.

Those sorts of numbers are well beyond anything in this field has shown with the the other two hard in the market- Holy Racket and Frilled, coming through a 955m race where the winning rating was 105. Frilled was luckless there but this is a fair bit harder and I'm happy to back in the class of Katsu here at a very fair price.

The other bet on the card comes up in the McEwen Stakes, where I find it hard to go past Oscar's Fortune.

It wasn't a great race he ran in at his Melbourne debut behind Bellatrix Star, but he sat close to a strong tempo and was clearly the best of the on pace runners, beaten half a length in second.

He ran to 114 on the R&S scale there which isn't all that far off his best Perth ratings. Second-up last time in he ran to a career peak of 116 when beating Amelia's Jewel in the Roma Cup and anything like that should just beat these.

I don't mind the wide draw where he can come across and assess the pace inside, and with a couple looking genuine queries at the trip, he'll run it out no problem and be very hard to catch.

The Melbourne Mail

Best bet: Race 7 #2 Oscar's Fortune at $3.50
Also backing: Race 1 #2 Katsu at $4.80