According to Haydock's clerk of the course Dan Cooper, the choice to water on Tuesday before races on Friday and Saturday suddenly appears "questionable" given that rain began to fall on the Merseyside track on Wednesday morning and more is expected.
Five millimetres of water were poured onto the track, and while rain was predicted, the going was good to firm in certain areas.
The weather forecast, however, took a turn for the worse, and an amber weather warning was issued ahead of a card that was supposed to feature the undefeated Vandeek and a star-studded cast for the Temple Stakes.
“We’re currently in the midst of a large weather event. There’s a mixture of yellow and amber weather warnings and the forecast really deteriorated for us yesterday in the late morning and afternoon,” said Cooper, speaking on a Zoom call at lunchtime. “We’ve essentially got a position where they’ve declared this morning (for Friday) on good to firm, good in places, I’ll go on another afternoon walk and then an evening walk. We’ll more than likely be changing the ground to good very shortly and I should imagine by the morning it will be good, potentially good to soft in places. Then we have a dry Thursday and Friday by the looks of things – I’m assuming that the ground will probably stay at the slower side of good. We had a difficult decision to make on Tuesday with irrigation. The decision was made in light of the forecast and we were confident in that being the right decision, but that same forecast has since deteriorated which makes the decision look questionable. I understand and I have to say it was made with the detail that was at hand at the time.”