4 U.K. meetings today

The Western Meeting at Ayr, the biggest flat meeting of the year in Scotland begins today, although the main feature the Ayr Gold Cup is on Saturday. The card today is fairly low level, although the races are worth watching to determine if there is any draw bias in the sprints, which will be important information for the big 6 furlongs races coming up. The most interesting runner today is Red Hot Momma (Dianne Sayer/ Lee Topliss), who has won her last 5 races and now goes for the class 2 handicap over 10 furlongs 17.20 CET. She has gone up 44 lbs for her winning run and has never yet raced in this grade, and we honestly cannot imagine that she can win again against this much tougher opposition. Top-weight Emirates Dream (Saeed bin Suroor/ Darryll Holland), who had decent form last season in much better races, is our choice here. German-bred Daring Dream (Jim Goldie/ Gary Bartley) ran badly last time, but has a good each-way chance in the mile handicap at 16.50.

There are also a couple of German-breds of interest at Yarmouth. Zuider Zee (John Gosden/ William Buick) is very consistent and certainly deserves to get his head in front in the 1 13/4 mile handicap at 14.40, while Double Handful (Venetia Williams/ Silvestre de Sousa) has showed very little since moving to the U.K.; however we have not forgotten his good run in the 2009 German Derby and we fancy he could run much better now against very weak opposition in the 2 miles handicap at 17.40.

The fillies handicap over 6 furlongs at 17.00 is the best race at Pontefract. This looks very open, but we have a slight preference for Glas Burn (Jonny Portman/ Steven Craine); she has not won for almost a year, but is now on a nice weight and her stable is in good form. We also like CD specialist Dan Buoy (Richard Guest/ Billy Cray), coming off a 3 months break, in the stayers handicap here half an hour later.

Godolphin have runners all over today, but their main jockey Frankie Dettori is in action at Kempton´s evening meeting, where we expect him to win the main event on Saeed bin Suroor´s Spring of Fame at 21.10. Saeed has been upstaged by Mahmood al Zarooni so far this year, but is coming back into form and his runners should be followed from now on.