Seville can prove a cut above

LET'S put Carlton House to the side and accept that if he wins this afternoon's Investec Derby at Epsom it's just one more of life's little irritants - one particularly familiar but not exclusive to our beloved sport of horse racing.

I didn't believe him a certainty prior to the charade of the past week and with all that has apparently occurred in the interim I remain unimpressed and even less likely to entertain him today. Let's not deny that as a Dante winner he must have a real chance of success but that was an unusual running of the race in which the slow pace might have affected the result.

On that occasion, Carlton House was uncooperative with stall handlers, hard to settle in the race and yet he had the class and speed to come through late to beat the hitherto very strong travelling Seville.