Day two of the Qatar Goodwood Festival is done, and the Qatar Sussex Stakes produced one of the races of the season. Here is how the whole card unfolded, race by race, with the results in full and the horses we are taking out of it.
Our day two preview is up if you want to see what we said beforehand, and our day one review covers Tuesday, when three of our Top Rated runners won.
1:50 Coral Rewards Shaker Handicap: the ratings go one-two, and we backed the wrong half
A frustrating one for us, and a very good one for the numbers. In the 1:50 we deliberately took on our own Top Rated, Infraad (William Haggas, Tom Marquand), and put up Hatteen instead. Infraad won, and Hatteen was second. The ratings went one-two, and we picked the wrong half of it.
We genuinely cannot believe Hatteen did not get past. He travelled like the winner for most of the race and we were convinced he was going to sweep by. Being honest, we thought Tom Marquand was the stronger of the two in the saddle at the business end. Oisin Murphy looked a shade weak right at the finish, hands and heels rather than throwing everything at it, and our reading is that he thought he had already won it. We think he expected to go past and score by a cosy head or half a length, and instead Infraad found more and battled back up the inside.
We will still say it: we think Hatteen is the best horse of these. He just needed a slightly stronger ride. One part of our preview did hold up, mind. We said Cannes could not turn the form around while giving Hatteen 7lb, and he could not: he finished third, behind ours.
There is a footnote to this, and we suspect it will divide opinion. A stewards' inquiry was called, and Oisin Murphy, aboard the runner-up, did not suggest there had been any issue at all. His line was essentially that he did not deserve to win the race. Taken at face value, that is a rider being straight about an interference question and accepting the result.
We are not sure we read it that way, and this is opinion rather than fact, so take it as such. Our suspicion is that this was a jockey who knew he had not ridden all the way to the line, who had thought the race was won some way out, and who was in no mood to make a fuss about a result he privately felt he had thrown away himself. Not so much agreeing there was no interference, more knowing where the actual fault lay. Plenty will disagree with us, and that is fair enough, but we would rather tell you what we thought than pretend we thought nothing.