The major carnivals in Melbourne and Sydney might be grinding to a halt, but Matthew Smith has already cast his sights to ones on the horizon.
The Warwick Farm trainer is keen to make up for lost time with the star of his stable, Headwall, who is edging towards the concluding stages of the rehabilitation process from the injury that ended his spring campaign after just one run.
The six-year-old defeated Lady Shenandoah in the $1 million Group 3 Concorde Stakes but was soon after found to be suffering from a pastern injury, which caused him to miss all the rich sprints on the eastern seaboard, including the $20 million The Everest.
Smith, a native of Victoria, used an Aussie Rules analogy to try and outline what his loss meant to the stable.
“It’s like when you’ve got ‘Buddy’ Franklin kicking goals and he does a knee, that’s what it’s like for us,” Smith lamented.
“You lose your best player on the team, your best earner, it’s tricky.
“He is still spelling for another month then he’ll come in and away we’ll go.”
As eager as Smith is to see Headwall back at the track, he will not push him beyond his limits early and said there are good opportunities all the way through until late April.
After a luckless first-up fourth placing in the Oakleigh Plate last February, Headwall finished runner-up to Joliestar in the Newmarket Handicap before a third placing in the T J Smith Stakes and a second placing in the $5 million The Quokka, which Smith identified as a potential autumn target.
“It would probably be late autumn, he might head to The Quokka again,” Smith said.
“(We might) go back and try to get that on the board…but we will be happy just to get him back sound, get a couple of runs into him and see what happens.
“He’s a gun, the horse, if we can get him back.”
