3 minute read

This week's time of interest comes from Newcastle on Sunday where well-regarded two-year-old Jonker made an impressive winning debut.

We started 'A Squeeze Of Time' last week - which you can read here - with the idea being not necessarily to highlight the fastest or best time of the week but simply a time that could (perhaps even should) be of interest to punters from the preceding weekend.

This week we are going to put the focus on to Sunday's impressive Newcastle winner Jonker who was sent out an odds-on favourite for his debut and, having won by a cosy three lengths, now finds himself at the pointy end of betting for next month's Magic Millions 2yo Classic at the Gold Coast.

Jonker's debut time returned a speed figure of 93. That's certainly not the best time across the land from the past weekend, and it's not particularly significant in itself, but it's fairly good at the first time of asking and, as was the case with the horse we highlighted last week, it came finishing fast.

There have been 507 races run by two-year-olds this season and, including Jonker, 44 of them have returned a time rated 93 or better. So it was in the best 8.7% of overall two-year-old times this season. Reason to be upbeat.

Then we have Jonker's finishing speed (104%) which hints at him having been capable of running ~2.5 lengths quicker had he run his race more efficiently.

So, despite limited evidence to date, we can fairly confidently say that we are dealing with a horse capable of running around the 100 mark - his current Timeform rating is 99p - and there's natural improvement from a horse having had just one run to consider as well.

So Jonker is good, and should prove better still, but as a punter it really doesn't matter that we like a horse. What matters is how much we like it, and as a general 10-1 chance in the Magic Millions at present Jonker's debut looks a little bit overplayed.

Of those currently prominent in betting for the Magic Millions it's the Snowden-trained pair Bondi and Legislation who have the best times in the book.

Both have had better opportunity to run a fast time, coming off efficiently run races, but Bondi in particular didn't mess about with that opportunity when running second to Performer in the Breeders Plate

The Breeders Plate is easily the fastest two-year-old race of the season to date and responsible for half-a-dozen of the top twenty two-year-old times achieved so far. It wouldn't be a bad idea to have the first seven home there in the blackbook for the second half of the season but Bondi is a must in the immediate future.

Click here to add Bondi to your Blackbook