Saturday 14th August 2021

Author: Jordan Yates

“Welcome to this week’s Saturday Preview, it will be a short blog this week as I only have a couple of punts that I fancy over the day and both of these come from Newbury, where’s it’s Hungerford Stakes Day.

It’s been a decent week punting wise on the blog, with the last two picks on the Facebook Story both winning in the form of Create Belief and Earlswood over in Ireland. But the biggest win of the week definitely came last Sunday when Ebro River took the Group 1 Phoenix Stakes at the Curragh, which was put up at 14/1 in the morning on the Facebook page.

As every though, enjoy this short preview!”

– Jordan

The first of the two races I’ll be looking at this week takes place at 2:20 and it’s the Group 3 Geoffrey Freer Stakes which is contested over a distance of a mile and five and a half furlongs. For me, this is all about Hukum here for Owen Burrows and Jim Crowley, sporting the Shadwell silks. He bounced back to form the last day at York with a win in the Group 3 Silver Cup when beating the smart Outbox by just shy of two lengths. On his penultimate outing he was only three lengths behind the very talented Wonderful Tonight in the Hardwicke at Royal Ascot and finds himself clear on ratings against his opposition here. The main danger to him probably comes in the form of the filly Golden Pass for Hugo Palmer, who’s still unexposed and could have more improvement in her, she also gets six pounds off the favourite.

Moving onto the second race of the day that I’ll be sharing my opinions on, and this is the feature event at 3:30 which is the Group 2 Hungerford Stakes over seven furlongs. My original pick for this was Danyah, who I thought had a great chance, but he’s unfortunately been withdrew from the contest so I’m going with a super sub here who I also think has a solid chance. This is the William Haggas trained Sacred who’s the mount of Tom Marquand, she hasn’t been seen since finishing just over four lengths behind Mother Earth in the 1000 Guineas when seemingly not staying the mile. However, when tried over today’s trip on her penultimate outing in Group 3 Nell Gwynn Stakes at Newmarket, she won well beating Saffron Beach under Ryan Moore. I think dropping back to seven could see her to best effect once more. Her main danger looks to be Charlie Appleby’s Al Suhail who’s a worthy enough favourite here on the back of his third placed effort in the Group 2 Summer Mile at Ascot.