Godolphin, having coughed up a week ago to supplement last year’s winner, Daylami, for the race, decided yesterday that pounds 15,000 was small change they could afford to toss away and withdrew the colt to save him for the King George.Having supplied the first three home last year, the Dubaians now rely solely on Xaar, who produced a decent, solid performance to be third in the Prince of Wales’s Stakes at Royal Ascot last time, but one which bore little resemblance to the awesome display in the 1997 Dewhurst Stakes which earned him such a lofty reputation.The Ascot race holds the key to today’s Eclipse though with the first four home, Lear Spear, Fantastic Light, Xaar and Chester House reopposing. The King George VI and Queen Elizabeth Stakes, first run in 1951, and York’s International Stakes, which did not see the light of day until 1972, are new arrivals compared to the Eclipse which is still going strong at the age of 113.
Sadly, the field for this final Eclipse of the century is hardly a vintage one. IS THERE a horse in today’s Eclipse Stakes fit to join the roll of illustrious winners of the first of the summer’s great all-aged, middle- distance races? The search for the season’s true champions starts here as the Classic generation take on their elders for the first time. The Eclipse of 1903 produced the first “race of the century” when Ard Patrick, Sceptre and Rock Sand, who had won eight Classics between them, fought out the finish. And from Bayardo in 1909, through Coronach and Colorado in the 1920s to the champions of the 1970s, Mill Reef and Brigadier Gerard, and on to the latter-day winners Pebbles, Dancing Brave and Nashwan, the greatest names have graced the Sandown turf. I was very worried about the draw, with the horse drawn right out under the hedge. But he has got a bit of foot, he broke well and from then on it was a galloping display.”The ground has helped him because it takes a bit of pace out of the others and he loves it He is a lovely horse to train and to have in the yard.

It is difficult taking on older horses but he was really well weighted.”. Carrying a 4lb penalty for a win at Goodwood last Monday Moutahddee, backed from 16-1 to 6-1 in midweek but 10-1 on the day, ran on under Tim Sprake to maintain a length-and-a-half lead over King Darius, who short- headed Algunnaas, like the winner owned by Sheikh Ahmed Al Maktoum, for third.
After the victory Tregoning, Dick Hern’s former assistant and in his second full season with a licence, praised Sprake’s tactics He said: “The horse got a super ride. MARCUS TREGONING landed the most valuable success of his training career when Moutahddee made all to land an ante-post gamble in the Hong Kong Jockey Club Trophy Handicap at Sandown yesterday. Another mocked his ears – big flappers of the Prince of Wales variety – for which he demanded an apology and was laughed at still more.The pertinent point today, of course, is that he is himself a Kiwi, the son of a Liverpool builder but born in Christchurch, modelled on Richard Hadlee but passed over by the country of his first allegiance.”It doesn’t mean any more to me to be playing against New Zealand,” he said before this match But then exiles always say that And no one at Edgbaston yesterday believed it for a moment.. Others sympathised with his sensitive nature, which the crueller comments brought out He had undergone a charisma bypass, one writer wrote. Then came the elevation of Alec Stewart to the captaincy and another Caddick demise.Certainly, during the formative years of his international career he was seen as rather taciturn and introverted and not at all a team man.

Ditched by Ray Illingworth, he won a recall in August 1996 and from February 1997 enjoyed 14 months of almost permanence. This is the third of his comebacks, which reflects not only fluctuating form but the unavoidable fact that he is not everybody’s cup of tea.He began against Australia in 1993 and toured the Caribbean the following winter. Now demons in the pitch are giving New Zealand the jitters.To be acclaimed for heroic deeds is not an especially familiar experience for Caddick in an England career of stops and starts. By 5.30pm, with eight Kiwis back in the hut – five of them falling to the bowling of Caddick – and only 52 runs on the board, we know it to have been a portentous moment. And while 126 did not in any way qualify as a respectable total – 158 is the previous lowest against New Zealand here – at least it was not 64, which England had totalled at Wellington during the winter tour of 1977-78.Then Caddick, whom one suspected had ousted Alan Mullally for the privilege of bowling at the more helpful Pavilion End, sends Roger Twose back with the first ball of the second innings, completing a wretched Edgbaston return for the former Warwickshire man, who faced only four deliveries in the match. However, where England are concerned these days you can take nothing for granted – not even abject failure.
Enter Andy Caddick and Alex Tudor, hardly the most accomplished of cricketers at chasing lost causes But thanks be to them They stuck around They played some shots. We now accept that this was not the case.”

To muse along these lines was understandable.