Luke Morris has his eye on a potential All-Weather superstar this season

THE all-weather season kicked off on Thursday and over the next few months there will be plenty of good action to keep us entertained.

The thing to remember when watching the racing on the all-weather is that trainers and owners have a very different approach to it now than they used to and are a lot more targeted and planned.

So basically when looking for winners you want to try and identify horses who have been kept back or bought specifically for an all-weather campaign. In the past trainers didn’t really look to target it but now because there’s such good prize-money horses are kept back for that.

Having a fresh horse at this time of year as opposed to one that’s been on the go since the spring is a definite advantage. A lot of the bigger yards will have had an eye on a winter campaign for certain horses for a while now and being able to spot these horses and follow them over the next few months is the best way to find winners.

Another good angle to look for is trying to identify stables that have a good past record during the all-weather season. The likes of Marco Botti and Michael Appleby always have big squads for the winter and will have a lot of nicer horses targeting the races.

You’ll see a lot of nice, late-maturing two-year-olds running in the maidens at this time of year whereas in years gone by you wouldn’t have seen that, for example. Trainers who like to target the all-weather are running horses that could realistically make up into Group performers in some of the races on a Saturday.

There are a few horses I hope will be running on the all-weather this winter but the final decisions haven’t been made yet. One that I know is running is Burcan and he’s a horse I’m looking forward to seeing over the next few months.

He’s with Marco Botti now having started off with Jeremy Noseda and he’s been raced exclusively on the all-weather so far. He’s been kept back for a winter campaign and I think he’ll thrive this winter.

He’s lightly raced and I can see him landing a few races over the next few months and maybe running in something nice as well.
Hopefully I’ll be back by the time he’s running after I broke my collarbone in a fall at Chelmsford last weekend.

I had an x-ray last Saturday after the fall and it looked a fairly clean break. On Tuesday I saw the doctor again to get an update and rather than operate on it we decided to let it knit together and I’m in no pain at all really.

Things are going smoothly from that point of view and I’ve got another appointment with the specialist on Tuesday and I’ll have some physio then as well. I’ve got a lot of good people helping me out and hopefully I can get back sooner rather than later.

My target is three weeks which would put me back in action on November 19. It might be slightly ambitious and I don’t want to rush back if things aren’t ready.

But if everything goes smoothly then that’s a realistic target and there’s two nice Listed races that day at Lingfield so it would be worthwhile to get back then as well. Fingers crossed.

Cheers,
Luke

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