Nap of the Day: Follow Balding’s new Lad on Saturday

On a busy Saturday featuring eight meetings - five over jumps and three on the flat - we go to Musselburgh for the Nap of the Day, following a team in red-hot form.

Andrew Balding has been in the headlines this week after Qatar Racing made the decision to remove all their horses from his Kingsclere yard, but I'm more interested by his outstanding start to the season.

The 52-year-old has enjoyed 44 winners from 208 runners - a 21% strike rate - already this calendar year, and more immediately he's operating at a 25% strike rate courtesy of 14 winners from 56 runners in the past fortnight.

That bodes very well for WILTSHIRE LAD in this 0-95 handicap over a mile round Musselburgh.

Under the tutelage of the recently retired Sir Michael Stoute, the three-year-old son of Wootton Bassett showed us glimpses of the ability he possesses as a juvenile, despite winning just one of his four starts.

In hindsight, he could hardly have been handed a tougher introduction than the seven-furlong novice event he contested at Doncaster last June.

The winner of that race, New Century, is a Group 1 winner with a mark of 110 and Field Of Gold, favourite for the Betfred 2000 Guineas after winning the G3 Craven Stakes at Newmarket impressively the other day, was back in third. A place behind him was Glittering Legend (104), who landed a Listed prize at Newcastle on All-Weather Championships Finals Day on Friday.

So, Wiltshire Lad finishing fourth, just under seven lengths adrift of the winner, was it's fair to say an encouraging start to his racing career.

He was then sent to Chester for another 7f maiden and this time finished runner-up, just a length-and-a-half off the pace, to another good one in Seagolazo. Hugo Palmer's son of Havana Grey was fourth in the £300,000 2-Y-O Stakes at Doncaster not long after and is rated 96 today.

I don't know what went wrong for the selection at Yarmouth, but he bounced immediately back to win a Southwell handicap in October in good style off a mark of 78. Since then, he's changed hands, been gelded and is now ready to make his first start for new connections.

Sir Michael's horses would often get better year-by-year, so I expect a good bit more from the selection this term - and I don't expect a rise of just five pounds to be enough to stop him on reappearance.

Concerns about his fitness after well over 200 days off the track are only slight given the form of the yard, so all things considered I think there's a lot to like about Wiltshire Lad's chance under the equally in-form Oisin Murphy.

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