Don’t make me tile the sea

Sadly the racing season both for pure-bred Arabians and even for camels was over when I was in Qatar last weekend. But I did discover that Arab mums, like British trainers, tend to wear rose-tinted spectacles. ‘To an Arab mother,’ the Gulf saying goes, ‘every donkey is a gazelle.’ I do rather like, too, the way angry Arabs don’t tell someone to ‘go and jump in the lake’ but to ‘go and tile the sea’.

I can only hope, after the traumas of seconditis that we suffered with our winter Twelve To Follow, that I don’t get too many end-of-season invitations to go aquatic tiling. And hope was resurrected over jumps. Attentive readers might recall that I offered John Quinn’s Leslingtaylor as a substitute for the injured in my Twelve. The other day he won the first big hurdle race of the new season at 16–1. Stick with him.

Let us start the summer ball rolling with Supersonic Dave, a three-year-old trained at Manton by Brian Meehan, who won more money abroad last year than any other British trainer. Supersonic Dave, a three-year-old who should stay a mile and a half, was Jamie Spencer’s choice when I asked him what he was most looking forward to riding this year.

We need a few two-year-olds. I liked the look of Mark Johnston’s Grand Fleet, a good-sized though inexperienced individual who won easily at Nottingham last month. Newmarket-based Julie Fielden looks to have something decent with the Ascot-bound Spirit of Sharjah, who cost only 8,000 guineas but has already won at Newmarket and Goodwood, quickening impressively. Another who caught the eye was Barry Hills’s filly Spinning Lucy, who was beaten into third place at Newmarket behind her stable companion Mookhlesa and would probably have won with a clear run.