By David Nagel
Pakenham trainer Mick Huglin is hoping his frustrating days are behind him with his talented chestnut gelding Big Friday.
In March last year, Big Friday looked set for a very promising career after being nosed-out by Deepstrike in a photo finish at Pakenham.
Deepstrike has since gone on to win almost $250,000 in prizemoney, while Big Friday had to wait until Thursday – on the new synthetic track at Pakenham – to chalk up the first victory of his eight-start career in the $35,000 Maiden Plate (1400m).
The four-year-old, by Nostradamus/She’s Pretentious, has been competitive at most of his runs, but ran an absolute shocker at Ballarat just 10 days out from his eventual maiden win.
Huglin thinks he knows where the problem has been.
“It’s his attitude, he’s quite hit and miss as we saw last week,” Huglin said.
“He found the right race tonight…he was horrible last week; he just didn’t like the kickback one bit at Ballarat.
“He didn’t even get a participation award last week, so it was good to get back on his home deck, he thrives here, his best runs have been at Pakenham, either on the grass or synthetic.
“He’s been jumping all week, his work’s been good and Stack (Daniel Stackhouse) gave him a beautiful ride, the right cart in and he was too strong late.”
Huglin said he put Big Friday over the jumps to try and regain some enthusiasm for the task at hand.
“He was non-competitive last week, and when you go the races with a horse who has good form going into it, has trialled okay, and runs like that, you feel bad for the owners because, literally, you wouldn’t have given him an Auskick award last week,” Huglin said.
“We jumped him, got the blood flowing, fired him up, something different, back on his home deck, good ride, blinkers off, and he was strong through the line.”
Unlike Ballarat, the new synthetic track at Pakenham is showing little sign of kickback and horses are enjoying the experience.
“This track is beautiful, we’ve been training on it for the last two weeks and he’s done a bit of work on it, like most of the Pakenham horses have,” Huglin said.
“He’s a funny travelling horse as well, so he’s more relaxed when he’s at home and I don’t think he’ll be leaving the synthetic…not for the next few runs anyway.
“It’s good prizemoney here and there’s no float fees for the owners, so they’ll be happy.
“He’s been a frustrating horse.
“We though he’d be in town by now but now he’s in a Thursday night synthetic maiden.
“But it was good, we’ve got it out the way and hopefully with that confidence he can really go on with it from here.”
Stackhouse knows the horse well and was also relived after the race.
“He’s been a frustrating horse for Huggy (Huglin) and the connections, he’s shown nice ability and he was still a maiden, but he took all the gear off today, he stepped really nicely from the gates and I just rode him comfortable,” Stackhouse said.
“He was able to snuggle back and travel nicely just behind the favourite.
“I got him wound up at the 800 so he was on the bridle and ready to go and launch off the corner.
“He took a while to really get into his gears, but once he got through his gears, he hit the line really nicely.”
Stackhouse agreed that the new track really did play int Big Friday’s hands.
“At Ballarat, there’s a lot of kickback and spray there, he didn’t really appreciate that, but this new track at Pakenham seems really good,” he said.
“They feel quite good underneath you and you don’t get that kickback like you do at Ballarat.”
Pakenham trainers prepared three winners on the card at Tynong, with Gareth Andrews (Montenegro) and Phillip Stokes (Maui) joining Huglin as home-town heroes.
