Is it time to rip up the Dubai dirt and start again?

When they had their biggest hit in the 1980s, Edwyn Collins and his Scottish popsters Orange Juice weren't talking about the dirt strip at Meydan. But they might as well have been. Rip it up and start again, they suggested. Or, given that they took out the Tapeta a few years ago, rip it up and start again . . . again.

So the Dubai World Cup meeting is almost upon us, promising a brilliant array of top-class cosmopolitan contests in a lavishly exotic setting. Plus a huge slice of uncertainty about the dirt track, where the post-position draw could be absolutely pivotal owing to the horrible track bias that tends to dominate proceedings at Meydan. Anyone who watched Super Saturday will have seen anything they needed to know: get in front on the rail and there is a pretty good chance you'll stay there.

Every racecourse on the planet offers some kind of bias, so in a sense it is just a question of degree. More than one Breeders' Cup, for example, has been affected, including last year at Del Mar where the estimable Gun Runner managed to overcome an unholy bias favouring outside closers, something rarely seen in southern California.