A week after dominating the Golden Gift meeting at Rosehill with a four-winner haul, Tommy Berry will be on a mission to continue his momentum with another full book of rides at Newcastle.
Berry has mounts in all 10 races and nine of them are at single-figure odds, including the Ciaron Maher and David Eustace-trained King’s Charisma, who is favourite for the $300,000 The Beauford (2300m).
He also partners the resuming Bandersnatch for Team Hawkes in the $1 million The Hunter (1300m) and debutante Russian Conquest for Peter and Paul Snowden in the Max Lees Classic (900m) for the two-year-olds.
Berry says that rather than look at his day as a whole, he has found the best approach is to take each race as it comes.
“I don’t look at it as a good book of rides, I just look at it as an individual ride,” Berry said.
“‘Hawkesy’ (trainer John Hawkes) gets annoyed sometimes because when I do ride a bad race, I forget about it very quickly and move onto the next, and I think you’ve got to do that.
“I’ve got a new bunch of owners, a new trainer to ride for so I’ve got to be fresh-minded.”
Berry capitalised on the absence of fellow big gun riders James Mcdonald, Hugh Bowman, Kerrin Mcevoy and Nash Rawiller last weekend, with that quartet all competing in Melbourne.
They will be back in action at Newcastle on Saturday but their presence will only spur the ever-competitive Berry to lift his game even higher.
Berry launched a much-publicised bid for the Sydney jockeys’ premiership last season and while he had an outstanding year with 111 metropolitan wins – a figure which would have won him the title in any one of the 13 preceding seasons – he fell 20 victories short of McDonald.
For Berry, that equated to failure.
“I was talking to (former champion jockey) Darren Beadman about it last year and how I wasn’t happy,” Berry said.
“I expected more of last year and he said ‘How? You rode your best season’ and I said, ‘But I didn’t win the premiership, that wasn’t good enough for me’.
“It’s going to be very hard to do it in years to come but I’m going to do it one day.”
Berry has missed more than a month of the current season through suspension but has booted home 12 winners from his past 50 to be sitting fourth on the premiership table.