Casino, Goulburn previews: Trainer Colt Prosser overcomes Mid-North Coast floods and sets his sights on prestigious double
Wauchope trainer Colt Prosser has spent the best part of last week cleaning up after the devastating floods on the Mid-North Coast.
Now, he will be hoping for a clean sweep of Casino's two big annual features.
Wauchope is an hour's drive from Taree and while that essentially makes the two towns neighbours, Taree was more or less ground zero for the big weather event.
'It was not too bad, just a lot of flooded stables,' Prosser said.
'Safety-wise we were all good. The town coped a lot and went under and everyone was isolated.
'It was a big weekend on the tools and the wheelbarrow and shovels but we'll be okay, a lot of people did it a lot worse than us.'
Cenotes makes it three wins in a row 3�⃣
He wins easily at Kempsey and gives Ben Looker a double! @ColtProsser pic.twitter.com/UCU67h1f67
â€' SKY Racing (@SkyRacingAU) September 19, 2024
Prosser's Beef Week Cup participant, Cenotes, will tackle the $45,000 1400m feature first-up having last been seen on October 11 when down the order in the Port Macquarie Cup.
This will be only his second 'Cup' but certainly not the last, according to Prosser.
'Cenotes is going to be in for a nice campaign,' the trainer said.
'He is going to be in all the Country Cups around the corner.
'He is first-up and he's just been ineffective at anything under a mile so if he can run good race, I'll be happy.
'I expect him just to improve with a run under his belt.'
Cenotes will be ridden by Country Championship Final winning jockey Ben Looker who boasts a favourable record on the son of Rebel Dane of three wins and a second from six rides.
Looker was also Prosser's choice for Bjorn Ironside who will square off with stablemate, Dis Is Heaven, in the Casino Flying over 1000m.
Bjorn Ironside's current personal best was his close and closing third in this season's MNC Championship Qualifier over 1200m but his one and only 1000m test was hard to forget, even for Prosser.
Bjorn Ironside and @ashmorgan6 sail down the centre of the course to take out Race 7 at @_TJC pic.twitter.com/Hz7LVU1eiq
â€' SKY Racing (@SkyRacingAU) June 21, 2024
'He's only had one go at 1000m and he smashed them,' the trainer said.
'This is up in grade and he hasn't had a run since he went to Brisbane but I brought him home and he's freshened-up good.'
Dis is Heaven, meanwhile, will be taking a step back in class when he steps out in the Casino co-feature.
That's because his last run was at the midweeks where he finished third in the 1000m Benchmark 72, $60,000 affair.
'He's going great and he doesn't mind a soft track,' said Prosser.
'I just would have liked to draw a little bit better at Casino with him but he can be a run-on horse so if they happened to be put a bit on pressure on, he can relax and finish off.
'I was really disappointed I couldn't go back to Sydney with last week when we were flooded in, I couldn't get there.
'He hasn't had too many dramas. He's nice and fit and he's going well.'
â– â– â– â– â–
Former jockey, now Hawkesbury-based trainer Blake Ryan is hoping the well-bred two-year-old Nothing But Net can pull of a slam dunk on debut at Goulburn
Nothing But Net was one of 138 foals to emerge from the first crop of ATC Sires' Produce and Champagne Stakes winner, King's Legacy.
His grandam is Georgette Silk whose single win came on debut in the 2020 ATC Widden Stakes.
'He has always shown me a little bit,' Ryan said.
'He was in our Ready 2 Run draft and he breezed up the quickest of the lot but was passed in.
'He went online and when the client sold him, Matthew (Sandblom) bought him and gave him back to me to train.
'He seems to be a horse that a 1000m isn't going to be his go. He is bred to be a 1400m horse so he is going to improve.'
Asuriito was always in control under James Innes Jnr and he brings up his second win in as many starts for the @blakeryan86 stable ðŸ'� @moruyaraces pic.twitter.com/GuydevYtk8
â€' SKY Racing (@SkyRacingAU) September 17, 2024
Nothing But Net won't be alone on the trip to Goulburn.
He'll be accompanied by another blue blood, namely Asuriito, who lines-up in the Pat Murphy Racing Class 2 Handicap (1000m).
A son of Brazen Beau, Asuriito, went to the Sapphire Coast on May 4 armed with an impressive record of two wins and a third from five starts.
And while costly in defeat for his many supporters, he left Bega with excuses.
'That track was very, very heavy and gluey,' Ryan said.
'On paper its says it was a Soft 7 but the grass was very long and it was very boggy. That, coupled with the weight, made it hard for him.
'He is an honest little campaigner. He had a tough run at Canberra before that but he keeps bouncing out of it, I'll give him that much.
'I would have liked to have a little bit better but only that dog-leg corner there at Goulburn from the 1000m, it shouldn't be too much of a hassle for him.'
Granted, Ryan's immediate focus is on Goulburn but once he's done there, he will be in countdown mode to Saturday's Midway Handicap at Rosehill where he is represented by the always reliable Lady Extreme.
'I'm really happy with her. 'I think she is going as well as she has ever gone,' Ryan said.
'And a heavy track wouldn't bother me. She's a duck.'
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ABC News
an hour ago
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Stan Grant on leaving the media and returning to his ancestors' Wiradjuri land
The leaves have turned from green to yellow and red and some have fallen already. Soon the branches will be bare, that is when the smoke from the early morning fires will settle over the village that sits beside a stream, all nestled in the valley. My valley. Here is the land of my ancestors — Wiradjuri land, Wiradjuri Ngurumbang. Protected, we are. Held. Yes, nature holds us all here and time turns on the seasons not the hands of a clock. There is an ancient rhythm in this place. Everyone says the same thing, whenever they come here, they say "I feel like time has stopped". It hasn't, time still works its way into us. Entropy will hasten us to our end. Physicists may debate whether time is real but life is finite. Or rather our lives are finite. Each of us allotted a number of years, for some tragically so few. For others maybe too long; long enough to grow lonely, left with too many memories. Every morning I wake in the cold before dawn to walk the hill past the shedding trees, from my house to the graveyard to sit with all the stories of all the people buried here. All my people because that's what we are. So many stories. One headstone marks the lives of three children, their deaths each separated by a few years and each gone before their first birthday. They've been dead now for more than a century. I wonder, what pain their parents must have endured. What took their lives? There are headstones under which wives and husbands rest together for all-time. There are some plots so old that no marker remains. And others forgotten. No one visits any more. Here at the graveyard I watch the sun rise every morning. I close my eyes and I feel it warm my body. In the quiet — and there is nothing as quiet as a graveyard — I say a prayer. This is so far from the world of noise in which I have spent too many years. It is two years now since I walked away from daily journalism. In truth, I stayed too long. Journalism stopped answering my questions a long time ago. I don't know if it ever did answer them. It is not that I am ungrateful, or regretful. My career was audacious and unimaginable. A boy like me was not meant to have this life. My journey took me from Aboriginal missions, to small towns in outback New South Wales, long dark nights in a cramped cold car looking out a foggy window as my family wandered from town to town looking for somewhere we might settle. We never really did. I kept moving. Journalism led me to more than 70 countries as I watched the world turn reporting on coups, wars, calamity, disasters of nature and humans. News doesn't like triumph. It feasts on suffering. It took its toll on my mind and my soul. There are friends I shared this journey with who are no longer here. The road took them. There are others I may no longer see but we are bonded forever. In the end, I don't know that I served journalism as well as it served me and that's probably true of all of us, whatever we do. We are never the equal of our calling. Maybe I never respected the craft. There is something shallow, ultimately un-serious about it all. Journalists think events determine our world, yet events tell us nothing. If we follow events we miss what the French call questions d'existence. We miss the meaning of it all. My yearning has led me to physics, philosophy, theology, accumulating a library of books, completing a PhD, writing books of my own and all of it maybe amounts to less than a falling leaf. Saint Thomas Aquinas after experiencing the presence of God late in life, said that all he had written was straw. We do not derive the truth from knowledge or news, we feel it. We participate in God — what Aquinas called ipsum esse, the act of existence — in our repose, in the quiet, in nature and in our mortality, the finality of our existence. No one reads yesterday's headlines. But we return to the poets. A line of poetry is greater than a mountain of newsprint. In the period since I have disappeared from our television screens, I have spent more time back here in this valley, in the land of my ancestors. I still read a newspaper occasionally, quickly and distractedly and sometimes I tune into the television but I don't pay it a lot of mind. I want to be closer to ipsum esse. I want to wonder at the turning seasons and be attentive to the souls of those with whom I share a breath, the water, the stars and this land. When I sit in the graveyard I laugh quietly at the silliness of making claims on nature. This land of my people is a land I share with all people. The souls buried here lived, laughed, cried and loved. Their battles now fought, won or lost. Their trails all at an end. This is their place. Our place. One day I will rest here with them. T.S Eliot wrote: "the point of intersection of the timeless with time, is the occupation of the saint." For all the distractions of life, the noise of news, for most of us, "there is only the unattended moment, the moment in and out of time." We are only undefeated because we have gone on trying. We find our rest, our truth, in the ultimate journey of our passing. We, content at the last if our temporal reversion nourish (not too far from the yew-tree) The life of significant soil. Stan Grant is a former ABC journalist and global affairs analyst. Compass visited him at his property on Wiradjuri country in the Snowy Mountains. Watch Compass tonight at 6.30pm on ABC TV or ABC iview.
The Advertiser
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Aki keen for Lions to learn lessons for Australia tour
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Faz gives it to us straight, there's no mucking around or no hiding here, he just tells you how it is. "There's no point in trying to sulk about it. If we bounce back quickly and try to get better every single day, this will only make us stronger and tighter." Aki's heavyweight centre partnership with Scotland's Australia-born Sione Tuipulotu generated the most excitement in selection ahead of the sold-out clash at Dublin's Aviva Stadium, but the combination failed to add up to the sum of its parts. While the Ireland powerhouse showed his strength as a carrier to surge over in the first half and Melburnian Tuipulotu had his moments with the ball in hand, together they were unable to link in the way the Lions were seeking and are unlikely to be used in tandem in the Test series. "We all know how Sione is as a player, he's class. The frustrating thing for me was I wasn't able to connect well with him," Aki said. 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Faz gives it to us straight, there's no mucking around or no hiding here, he just tells you how it is. "There's no point in trying to sulk about it. If we bounce back quickly and try to get better every single day, this will only make us stronger and tighter." Aki's heavyweight centre partnership with Scotland's Australia-born Sione Tuipulotu generated the most excitement in selection ahead of the sold-out clash at Dublin's Aviva Stadium, but the combination failed to add up to the sum of its parts. While the Ireland powerhouse showed his strength as a carrier to surge over in the first half and Melburnian Tuipulotu had his moments with the ball in hand, together they were unable to link in the way the Lions were seeking and are unlikely to be used in tandem in the Test series. "We all know how Sione is as a player, he's class. The frustrating thing for me was I wasn't able to connect well with him," Aki said. "He's an unbelievable player and there's no excuses, we've got to get better as a partnership going forward. "Sione has been my roomy lately. He snores a fair bit at the moment, so he keeps me up at night! But he's a great man. "He speaks out loud, which is good because we need him to be himself. I just feed off him and he feeds off me. So it's brilliant, but we've just got to be better and keep learning together." Boss Farrell is demanding an improvement from his squad when they start preparing for their opening match against Western Force next Saturday at Perth's Optus Stadium. "We won't sugar-coat this. We need to be honest because if we're not honest, how do we gain trust with each other?" Farrell said. "Losing hurts, especially in this jersey. We need to find the solutions pretty quickly and be honest with ourselves because some good has to come from this." Ireland centre Bundee Aki insists the British and Irish Lions must recover rapidly after seeing their goal of completing an unbeaten tour of Australia thwarted even before arriving Down Under. The Lions slipped to a 28-24 defeat against Argentina in Dublin on Friday as they lost their tour opener for the first time since 1971, albeit against dangerous opponents whose surgical finishing demonstrated why they are ranked fifth in the world. Andy Farrell's men flew off to Perth on Saturday and have four weeks to find the improvements needed to turn their ambitious but error-strewn performance into a formula capable of toppling the Wallabies. "Faz set out the aim for us to win every single game. To not be able to come out with the result that we wanted in the first has got to be one of those things that we learn from quickly," Auckland-born Aki said. "We're adults, we're old enough to be able to take it on the chin and move on quickly. Faz gives it to us straight, there's no mucking around or no hiding here, he just tells you how it is. "There's no point in trying to sulk about it. If we bounce back quickly and try to get better every single day, this will only make us stronger and tighter." Aki's heavyweight centre partnership with Scotland's Australia-born Sione Tuipulotu generated the most excitement in selection ahead of the sold-out clash at Dublin's Aviva Stadium, but the combination failed to add up to the sum of its parts. While the Ireland powerhouse showed his strength as a carrier to surge over in the first half and Melburnian Tuipulotu had his moments with the ball in hand, together they were unable to link in the way the Lions were seeking and are unlikely to be used in tandem in the Test series. "We all know how Sione is as a player, he's class. The frustrating thing for me was I wasn't able to connect well with him," Aki said. "He's an unbelievable player and there's no excuses, we've got to get better as a partnership going forward. "Sione has been my roomy lately. He snores a fair bit at the moment, so he keeps me up at night! But he's a great man. "He speaks out loud, which is good because we need him to be himself. I just feed off him and he feeds off me. So it's brilliant, but we've just got to be better and keep learning together." Boss Farrell is demanding an improvement from his squad when they start preparing for their opening match against Western Force next Saturday at Perth's Optus Stadium. "We won't sugar-coat this. We need to be honest because if we're not honest, how do we gain trust with each other?" Farrell said. "Losing hurts, especially in this jersey. We need to find the solutions pretty quickly and be honest with ourselves because some good has to come from this."
Perth Now
3 hours ago
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Aki keen for Lions to learn lessons for Australia tour
Ireland centre Bundee Aki insists the British and Irish Lions must recover rapidly after seeing their goal of completing an unbeaten tour of Australia thwarted even before arriving Down Under. The Lions slipped to a 28-24 defeat against Argentina in Dublin on Friday as they lost their tour opener for the first time since 1971, albeit against dangerous opponents whose surgical finishing demonstrated why they are ranked fifth in the world. Andy Farrell's men flew off to Perth on Saturday and have four weeks to find the improvements needed to turn their ambitious but error-strewn performance into a formula capable of toppling the Wallabies. "Faz set out the aim for us to win every single game. To not be able to come out with the result that we wanted in the first has got to be one of those things that we learn from quickly," Auckland-born Aki said. "We're adults, we're old enough to be able to take it on the chin and move on quickly. Faz gives it to us straight, there's no mucking around or no hiding here, he just tells you how it is. "There's no point in trying to sulk about it. If we bounce back quickly and try to get better every single day, this will only make us stronger and tighter." Aki's heavyweight centre partnership with Scotland's Australia-born Sione Tuipulotu generated the most excitement in selection ahead of the sold-out clash at Dublin's Aviva Stadium, but the combination failed to add up to the sum of its parts. While the Ireland powerhouse showed his strength as a carrier to surge over in the first half and Melburnian Tuipulotu had his moments with the ball in hand, together they were unable to link in the way the Lions were seeking and are unlikely to be used in tandem in the Test series. "We all know how Sione is as a player, he's class. The frustrating thing for me was I wasn't able to connect well with him," Aki said. "He's an unbelievable player and there's no excuses, we've got to get better as a partnership going forward. "Sione has been my roomy lately. He snores a fair bit at the moment, so he keeps me up at night! But he's a great man. "He speaks out loud, which is good because we need him to be himself. I just feed off him and he feeds off me. So it's brilliant, but we've just got to be better and keep learning together." Boss Farrell is demanding an improvement from his squad when they start preparing for their opening match against Western Force next Saturday at Perth's Optus Stadium. "We won't sugar-coat this. We need to be honest because if we're not honest, how do we gain trust with each other?" Farrell said. "Losing hurts, especially in this jersey. We need to find the solutions pretty quickly and be honest with ourselves because some good has to come from this."
