Half Yours faces a jump in quality on Saturday, but McEvoy is buoyed by the barrier draw of four which will allow\u00a0Jamie Melham\u00a0to give the stayer an economical run.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But McEvoy is realistic enough to know that he is facing some of Australia’s weight-for-age stars with a horse that was beaten in restricted grade four starts ago.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“We’ve got the favourite for the\u00a0Cox Plate, the favourite for the\u00a0Melbourne Cup, the best 2000-metre weight-for-age horse in the country, so I’m looking forward to seeing how he runs against them,” McEvoy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I think he will run really well. We don’t expect him to win, but in previous years, Naturalism winners have run well in Turnbull’s, but there hasn’t been Turnbull’s like this.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“He’s very sound, he’s very well, and he needs to run because he is so well.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“I just hope he runs well and hits the line. That’s what we want to see.”\u00a0<\/p>\n
With a Caulfield Cup start locked away, the McEvoy father-and-son team toyed with the idea of bypassing Saturday and going straight into the 2400m contest in a fortnight without another start.\u00a0<\/p>\n
But the Turnbull has been a good guide with last year’s Caulfield Cup winner Duke De Sessa finishing fourth at Flemington while Verry Elleegant (2020) and Incentivise (2021) took the double.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“My heart says it would have been fine for him, but we just thought that if we got there on the day, a month between runs, a big high-pressure contest being third up, it was a bit of a risk,” McEvoy said.\u00a0<\/p>\n
“The history of the Turnbull and how it works with the Caulfield Cup is why we elected to run.”\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Half Yours faces a jump in quality on Saturday, but McEvoy is buoyed by the barrier draw of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":174559,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[40],"tags":[3004,101,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-174558","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-racing","tag-racing","tag-sports","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174558","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174558"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174558\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/174559"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174558"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174558"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174558"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}