Sport

Half Yours: Undera’s Melbourne Cup connection

By Gus Underwood

Oct 31, 2025

Former Undera footballer Neville Smith with Melbourne Cup runner Half Yours. Photo by Supplied

Could the tiny township of Undera have a connection with a second major Australian racehorse triumph within 10 days?

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Next Tuesday punters are likely to send out galloper Half Yours as the favourite for the Melbourne Cup after his recent impressive Caulfield Cup win.

Part-owner of Half Yours, Neville Smith, is a former Undera footballer whose parents ran the Undera General Store from the 1950s to the 1970s.

Smith lived in Shepparton and Mooroopna for some time and married Mooroopna girl Gayle Garthwaite.

Neville and siblings Glen and Daryl played together in the Undera’s thirds side and one of their teammates was Ray Sellwood.

Daryl went on to play Goulburn Valley League football with Mooroopna and Euroa and also represented the GVL.

Sellwood and other former Undera players in Bob Boyer, Kevin Powells, John Hommes and Joe Minutoli own the star pacer Miki To Success, who was the hot favourite and claimed the Ladbrokes $60,000 South Australian Cup last Saturday night at Globe Derby in Adelaide.

Sellwood is hopeful the Undera connection can again figure in Australia’s most famous horse race next Tuesday.

‘‘It wouldn’t be a bad effort for a tiny town like Undera to have a Melbourne Cup connection with the winner as well as boasting the winner of the South Australian Cup all in the space of a couple of weeks,’’ Sellwood said, a native and fierce supporter of his hometown.

Smith said Half Yours was formerly trained by Ciaron Maher, but his owner died and all his horses came up for sale.

‘‘We were looking at paying $250 000 for him but he ended up costing $310,000 and we gave him to Tony and Calvin McEvoy to train,“ Smith said.

‘‘It has worked out well. He has won five races for us and I own 25 per cent of him.“

Smith said he always had an interest in racing horses and dabbled in a few early, but made a decision to get out of the ownership game until he could afford to buy and race a horse he owned a major share in.

That horse is Half Yours.

Will Half Yours run the Melbourne Cup distance is the main quandary for punters summing up the five-year-old’s chances in the race that stops a nation?

‘‘He won the Caulfield Cup and Caloundra Cup in Queensland which were both over 2400 metres and both the jockeys who rode him in those wins declared he would get the Melbourne Cup distance (3200 metres),’’ Smith said.

It's a good bet that Undera residents who aren’t up with the racing scene now have a horse to barrack for next Tuesday.