At Wolverhampton this evening old friends See The Buckthorn and Outreach run in the seven furlong Handicap; Pearl of Rowdown and Little White Dove both run in the six furlong Handicap; and Close of Play runs in the five furlong iteration, the last race on the card.

From reasonable draws, STB in five and Outreach in three, we hope that both have competitive, realistic chances over a trip and on a track where they have put up there best performances; Outreach wears pieces for the ft and Tyler's three pounds enhances both their chances; both should run well, the key to actually winning revolving around avoiding the traffic and there is not much doubt that STB could have gone real close over the c&d nine days ago if he had not been caught out wide.

It is harder to be quite so bullish about LWD, Pearl of Rowdown and Close of Play; Little White Dove's tail does not make for particularly attractive watching and she has to produce a similar performance to her second and third Maiden runs for Richard Hughes, running to around 55, to be involved this evening and she has a fair bit to find, even without the tail, on her four runs in Handicaps for Richard and for us; one positive is she does have a real good draw.

Pearl of Rowdown is equally well drawn next to LWD in four; she wears a hood for the ft and that will have to help her find around ten or eleven pounds with the top two; how she gets on this evening will help inform where we go with her moving forward

Close of Play ran an excellent race on her debut at the end of October 2022, running to around 60; as a result she was harshly handicapped with an om of 61; now down to 45, running off 46 this evening she has just about an OK draw in seven and wears a ft visor; she doesn't seem to have progressed over much over the last year and the visor does need to help her get back to something a little closer of either her debut run or her performance when she was third of seven over the c&d in October 2023, the one bit of form she has shown since that good debut run.

No runners tomorrow; and we are just looking at the declarations for Vitaine Vertaine, TBW, Alghazaal and Garden View for Wednesday.