Take a win and place wager on Storm Boy in the fourth event on this evening's tremendous Sha Tin card.
But watch your bets as the National Day Cup meeting opens with a live simulcast of local speedster Best Of The Best's crack at Japan's Grade One Sprinters Stakes. This is run at 2.35pm and is officially the first race of the programme. The second is not until 6.25pm at Sha Tin where the action culminates with Montjeu's attempt to lift back-to-back Prix de L'Arc de Triomphes. In between the Triple Trio is on races four, five and seven and not the usual three, four and six and the Double Trio is on races five and six, not the more customary four and five.
Storm Boy could be banker material for anyone wanting to take a TT, but may well be best used as a win and place wager or a banker in a multiple tierce. He's in an open looking affair and clearly has the likes of last-start winners Invincible General and Millennium Star to beat.
But there are grounds for thinking he will at least reverse recent running with Millennium Star. Storm Boy is eight pounds better off for the 2.5 lengths he was beaten by Millennium Star last time and the distance really should have been a length or perhaps less as Eric Saint-Martin just couldn't find a clear run for Storm Boy for almost the entire length of the Sha Tin straight.
Alex K. S. Yu now replaces the suspended Saint-Martin, but that is less of a drop in jockeyship than apprentice Bill C. P. Ting replacing Felix Coetzee on Millennium Star.
Ting appears far and away the best value of the current crop of seven and 10-pound claimers and could well have a bright future ahead of him. But Millennium Star is no easy ride as he can be slowly away and take a great deal of stoking up. He went flat coming off the home corner under Coetzee last time and required plenty of the super strong South African's dynamism in the saddle to get him into full steam.