Di­a­min­da is strong­ly-fan­cied to go one bet­ter in the open­ing Maid­en Fil­lies' Stakes over six fur­longs of 'good to soft' As­cot this af­ter­noon, first stage of a three-day meet­ing, which fea­tures the group one 'King George' to­mor­row. It's about halfway through what has been a des­per­ate cam­paign, weath­er-wise but life is 'here and 'now,' which means we should make the best of what we have and we do have plen­ty, com­pared to some un­for­tu­nate peo­ple, through­out this war-torn world.

Count your bless­ings and hope­ful­ly, your mon­ey af­ter Di­a­min­da has pro­gressed on the back of a promis­ing de­but three weeks ago, when a half length run­ner-up to Badr Al Badoor, over a sim­i­lar dis­tance, at Don­cast­er. This Alan Jarvis-trained, Di­a­mond Green fil­ly ran on well un­der Jim Crow­ley and the com­bi­na­tion was about two lengths ahead of Pearl Sea, sub­se­quent­ly sec­ond of 17 in a fierce­ly-com­pet­i­tive, HQ maid­en at the 'Ju­ly' meet­ing last week, to clas­sic prospect, Cer­ti­fy. This form bears close in­spec­tion and so does 'the field,' in op­po­si­tion but none should be ca­pa­ble of low­er­ing the colours of Di­a­min­da judged on my time-hand­i­cap rev­e­leations.

Charles Hills ap­pears to have the ide­al op­por­tu­ni­ty for con­sis­tent, some­what luck­less Shrop­shire in the twelve-run­ner 'aged' hand­i­cap over six fur­longs, one of three races at this dis­tance; makes my life so much eas­i­er with di­rect race-time com­par­isons.

Shrop­shire has been a mod­el of con­sis­ten­cy even though he's on­ly man­aged one suc­cess this sea­son, on Kemp­ton poly­track where he ab­solute­ly flew, un­der Matthew Law­son to get up in the last stride.

Sig­nif­i­cant­ly, or iron­i­cal­ly, Matthew is back on board and you can bet he'll be told to come fly­ing through on this love­ly grey, which could then be tar­get­ed at the Ayr Gold Cup Hand­i­cap. It all de­pends on this per­for­mance. Watch care­ful­ly, af­ter you've had an each-way punt. New­mar­ket stages it's cus­tom­ary 'Fri­day-nighter,' with a group en­ter­tain­ing af­ter­wards. Pri­or to that, once-raced Za­mdy Man should put the 'rock' rev­ellers in funds, by land­ing a ten-run­ner Maid­en Stakes over the straight mile, best bet on a sev­en-race pro­gramme.

SE­LEC­TIONS

RACE 5 (#3) DI­A­MIN­DA (nap e.w.)

RACE 9 (#1) HA­VANA GOLD

RSCE 17 (#4) SHROP­SHIRE (e.w.)

RACE 43 (#7) ZA­MDY MAN