IRISH stewards have come in for a bit of flak in recent months but if you want to read the best work of fiction to come from a stewards’ room in many years, take a look at the final three furlongs of the 1.50pm from Haydock last weekend. Rory Delargy picked up on it on Twitter.

See anything untoward? Apart from the significant fact that Frankie Dettori’s mount, the blinkered Carzola, looks the first horse beaten.

The jockey on the Tony Martin-trained Firstman, Paddy Harnett, was suspended for nine days (NINE DAYS, as Tommy Bowe might say) for “improper riding as he had manoeuvred his mount sharply right-handed”.

The ‘incident’ occurs when the camera angle is side-on, just before it switches to head-on, but it’s only for three seconds and when Firstman is moved gradually, not ‘sharply’, out, he is clearly going better than Dettori’s mount who was already being pushed along, the commentator saying “Frankie is driving away, and there’s not a great deal of response.”

The report says Carzola “received two significant bumps and became badly unbalanced, when Dettori was barged off his intended racing line.” To crown it, Dettori reported the filly ran flat, so she was clearly not going to finish any closer. Last year Paul Hanagan got 10 days for wiping out rivals due to ‘careless’ riding at Royal Ascot. To call this improper riding, worthy of a nine-day ban, in the context of what we usually see, was close to unbelievable.