An exciting finish and an exciting winner should not mask the St Leger's glaring decline

Reading and listening to some staunch defences of the St Leger in the last week has underlined just how much this great race still means to people — but I fear one or two might have been blinded to the reality of what we witnessed on Saturday.

At least we had an exciting finish in which an unbeaten and potentially top-class colt came out on top. But overall this was hardly a race to set the pulse racing, with just seven runners going to post and nothing from outside the Aidan O’Brien stable looking a serious contender or ultimately managing to land a blow.

The Leger is Britain’s oldest Classic but sadly in this day and age that means very little. ‘Classic’ is just a label tagged to five races which were once upon a time the pinnacle of British Flat races but nowadays are nothing more than often sub-standard Group 1 races run either too early in the season or over the wrong trip to produce definitive champions.