The calendar doesn’t tick over into spring until Sunday night, but you wouldn’t know it looking at Saturday’s field for the Memsie Stakes at Caulfield, with 10 Group 1 winners in an 11-horse line-up.

While it’s fined up at last in Sydney, one of the Memsie’s major winners comes courtesy of biblical recent rainfall in the harbour city — Fangirl, scratched from last week’s Winx Stakes because of the heavy 10 track.

The result is that Saturday’s Memsie field is a considerable upgrade on last year’s. Of the eight runners that day, just three were Group 1 winners at the time — and one of those was Aegon, whose sole major win had come almost four years earlier.

Still, the Memsie form held up okay in the 2024 spring. Mr Brightside ran second then won the Makybe Diva and Champions Mile while fourth-placed Antino won the Toorak.

Similarly in 2023, Mr Brightside won the Memsie then took the Makybe Diva next start and went down by a whisker to Romantic Warrior in the Cox Plate. Alligator Blood (fourth) won the Underwood and the Might And Power.

The Memsie was long a rich source for punters looking ahead to the Melbourne spring’s main events. In the 14 years from 2002, the Memsie field yielded (in the same year) two Caulfield Cup winners, six Cox Plate winners and six Melbourne Cup winners.

No “big three” winner has come through the Memsie since Prince of Penzance in 2015, but Saturday’s field suggests that could change.

In the search for the winner, it’s worth noting that 17 of the past 20 Memsie winners have been established Group 1 winners going into the race (last year’s winner, Pinstriped, being one of the three exceptions). Nine of the past 11 Memsie winners have jumped from gates 2-5.