Estrange camp hoping for rain ahead of Yorkshire Oaks
Minnie Hauk appears O'Brien's chief hope after completing the English-Irish Oaks double at Epsom and the Curragh. Whirl, a neck behind her stablemate at Epsom and a dual Group One winner since, is also in the potential line-up alongside Garden Of Eden and Bedtime Story.
Estrange, trained by David O'Meara for owner-breeders Cheveley Park Stud, progressed through the levels to take the Listed Gillies Fillies' Stakes at Doncaster last year before returning to action this term to win both the Lester Piggott Stakes and the Lancashire Oaks at Haydock.
Her only defeat to date came on good to firm ground at Yarmouth last season and connections are hoping at least some rain falls over York as they look to chart a path to the Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe at ParisLongchamp in October.
'It depends which forecast you look at, and I am probably guilty of looking at the one I want to look at rather than the one I don't!' said Cheveley Park's managing director Chris Richardson on the chance of rain at York.
🔴🔵⚪️ Estrange beats Scenic & captures the @bet365 Lancashire Oaks in a thrilling tussle 👇🏻 pic.twitter.com/24l8peCLaO
— Haydock Park Races (@haydockraces) July 5, 2025
'But she's very well, a bit of ease in the ground would be helpful. She's working well but this just happens to be a year of fast ground.
'We're working back from the autumn so we will see how we go and how we plan from here on out.
'If she can't run then there are some entries abroad we can look at, she's in the Fillies & Mares (on Champions Day at Ascot) and obviously the Arc later in the year.'
Day two of the Ebor Festival kicks off with the Sky Bet Lowther Stakes, a Group Two event over six furlongs, for which 12 juvenile fillies have stood their ground.
Walker's Royal Fixation, second by a neck to Venetian Sun in the Duchess of Cambridge Stakes, heads the market, while Ryan Moore is booked to ride Richard Hughes' 12-length Haydock winner America Queen.
George Scott's Princess Margaret runner-up Staya is in the mix, as are Tim Easterby's ultra-consistent Argentine Tango and Brian Ellison's Wor Faayth.
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Times
44 minutes ago
- Times
Eric Midwinter obituary: cricket statistician
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In his acclaimed 1981 biography of WG Grace — 'egocentric, bumptiously confident, extremely money-minded and paternalistic' — he made a strong case that the great man was 'a more complete and characteristic' representative of his age than Florence Nightingale, General Gordon or any of the other subjects in Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Among his many cricket titles, The Lost Seasons (1987) stands out as a lucid and discursive account of the game in the Second World War and was enlivened by his own childhood recollections, as was Brylcreem Summer (1991), about Denis Compton and Bill Edrich's annus mirabilis of 1947, when between them they scored more than 7,000 runs. Although his subject matter was sometimes esoteric —His Captain's Hand On His Shoulder Smote was a monograph on 'the incidence and influence of cricket in schoolboy stories' — his writing was never dense and his style always lively. 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'All my work has been motivated by that concept.' If he was occasionally rheumy-eyed, it was invariably done with a wonderfully light touch that never toppled over into sentimentality, such as his evocation in his Illustrated History of County Cricket (1992) of the timeless rapture of the village green 'with the brawny smith bowling fast long hops at the perturbed young clergyman'. Indeed, the link between cricket and the church that so often overlooked the village pitch was one of his many fascinations. 'If the Church of England was the Conservative Party at prayer, cricket was the Church of England at play,' he once wrote. His final book due to be published in November bears the title Christianity at the Crease. For several years he was editor of the MCC annual and he served for eight years as president of the Association of Cricket Statisticians, winning the Brooke-Lambert Trophy in 2019 as statistician of the year. The citation described him as 'the doyen of cricket historians and statisticians' but in truth, he was not a member of the 'Oh my God what a bore/ crickets stats by the score' school who could tell you how many bowlers had taken five wickets in an innings at Lord's on a Thursday in September. Rather, statistics were only used if they supported or illuminated a wider narrative, such as the 'facts and figures' appendix that he attached to his History of County Cricket. As Bernard Whimpress noted in reviewing one of Midwinter's titles in the ACS Journal, he was 'the most distinguished social historian to turn his hand to sports history and one of the pleasures of reading Midwinter is to discover so much from other spheres'. In accepting the ACS award, which he called 'the Oscar for cricket scholarship', Midwinter described himself as 'a social historian with an interest in cricket rather than a cricket historian' and with characteristic modesty suggested that 'in any gathering of ACS members, I would be like a rather mangy lion flung into a den of sagacious Daniels'. In turn, he became the subject of a biography when in 2015 Jeremy Hardie published Variety is the Spice of Life: The Worlds of Eric Midwinter. One of the co-founders in 1981 of the University of the Third Age (u3a), he was passionate about promoting lifelong learning through self-help groups for retired members of the community. 'The starting point was the sense that older age should be looked on more positively, and obviously less negatively,' he said. 'I find it difficult now to believe how bad the imagery of older age was in the 1970s. There was a sense of older age being over the hill and oldness was very much identified as illness.' 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Scottish Sun
2 hours ago
- Scottish Sun
Premier League's richest are getting richer but that's a concern.. and it could ruin English football from top to bottom
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3 hours ago
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Emma Raducanu lifts lid on Carlos Alcaraz dating rumours after sparking romance speculation earlier this summer
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