Cousins put faith in pin-up

EVERY morning at Flemington, Simon Zahra sees the endless parade of star Team Hayes horses and wonders how he and his cousin Mat Ellerton can compete.

“There’s just so many of them; mainly three-year-olds,’’ he said.

“We don’t see [Darren] Weir’s at the track, of course, but he has even more than Hayes, and now these days [Chris] Waller is sending truckloads down. Then there’s the Snowdens and others.

“It’s become incredibly hard, but you just poke along and try to do your best. It’s not just us struggling to go with those really big stables, 98 per cent of trainers are in the same boat.”

Ellerton and Zahra have 55 horses in work — and some of them are pretty good; it’s just Hayes and Weir and Co have endless armies of similar, or better, ones.

Zahra said horses like Crystal Dreamer, Booker and Odeon had been trialling well and would play a role in carefully selected races this spring.

Another, Sword Of Light, was to have run at Moonee Valley today but was scratched to run at Caulfield next week. This leaves the cousins with two runners today, Heatherly and Pin Your Hopes.

Heatherly is their pin-up horse and a raging favourite at $2.30 to defend her Carlyon Stakes title from last year. But she is far from perfect. Zahra said he was confident she could win but not certain.

“She’s well, probably going as good as ever, but she has a habit of missing the start, which might make it really tricky for her,” he said.

“There’s a bit of speed out wide and if she mucks up the start like she can then there’s going to be a lot of pressure on her to hold her spot. If she jumps good, holds them out, then she’s going to be hard to beat. But that’s ‘if’.”