Mesaafi

Ross Burdon trains Mesaafi out of Newmarket — the heartland of British flat racing — and his yard has been in decent form this season, sending out 12 winners. Mesaafi's most regular partner in the saddle is Callum Shepherd, and that combination has clicked once from five attempts together, a win rate of around 1 in 5, which is actually a reasonable return for a horse at this level and suggests Shepherd knows how to get the best from it.

The ground matters a great deal to this horse. On normal conditions, Mesaafi becomes a genuinely different proposition: 3 wins from 10 races, which is 30% — winning 3 in every 10 is the sort of figure that makes any trainer's ears prick up. Compare that to its overall record and you start to understand why the team will always be hoping for dry, standard ground on raceday. Most of Mesaafi's races have come at Class 4 level — a solid but unspectacular tier — and it has won 2 of 11 there, roughly 1 in 5, which is a perfectly respectable return.

What makes the current moment interesting is the gap since its last victory. Mesaafi won at Lingfield Park as recently as June 2025, but has gone six races without winning since, finishing fourth, fourth, third, tenth, eighth, and fourth in its most recent outings. Those finishes are not disasters — a horse finishing third or fourth is not disgracing itself — but the win has proved elusive. It raced just one day ago, so this is a horse very much in the thick of a busy campaign. Whether it can rediscover the spark that brought up that Lingfield win depends, as ever, on finding the right race on the right ground — and Mesaafi has shown it can do exactly that when everything lines up.