It's been a tough summer for Dettori. His main employers, the hugely rich and influential Godolphin stable, have been staring down both barrels of disaster for most of the season, and a normally extravagant haul of big race triumphs had, until last weekend at least, trickled to a standstill.

As a result, the upcoming York meeting is even more crucial than normal for the 'Boys in Blue'. The stable has shown some encouraging signs of recovery lately, but if their expensively assembled team is to drain any real comfort from the season then the momentum must continue over the three days of this week's Knavesmire meeting.

A strong Godolphin presence is important for flat racing and their emergence as a major global force over the last decade has been significantly beneficial to the industry. They have invested astronomical amounts in bloodstock and this largesse has helped racing at all levels.

Their inception of the Dubai World Cup in the spring and a sporting willingness to campaign horses beyond their classic year have greatly enriched the spectacle of the sport. Above all they have devised and implemented a revolutionary strategy for training racehorses.

The master plan of Sheikh Mohammed, the power behind the operation, is to remove the horses from the hardship of European winters and mature them in the warm and relaxing surroundings of the Al Quoz stables in Dubai. Although some trainers, including Vincent O'Brien, have over the years experimented with this concept, it has never been organised on such an industrial scale. The belief is that they return to their Newmarket stable in the spring, suntanned, relaxed and ready for the stresses of global battles over the next nine months.

Godolphin originally built their string from a choice combination of expensively bought or home produced yearlings but in recent seasons have drifted into a scatter gun, and slightly panicky, policy of buying up anything that looks to have the potential to win future group one contests. Their pockets are so deep that most ordinary owners generally find that resistance is futile.

The plan, until this season, has worked brilliantly. From modest beginnings in 1994, the operation has now picked up 127 group one victories, many of them in the most prestigious international events. The stable's roll of honour includes a catalogue of some of the greatest horses of the last decade, including Fantastic Light, Daylami and the brilliant but ill-fated Dubai Millennium who died from grass sickness after just a single year at stud.

Despite picking up two fairly soft group ones in Germany and France with Cherry Mix and Librettist last week, this year the wheels have come off in a fairly spectacular fashion. The stable had been without a group one winner in Europe and this includes a blank at Royal Ascot and remarkably, not even one good enough to take part in either of the Derbys.

Speaking earlier this year, Godolphin's racing manager, Simon Crisford put the stable's performance into context. "It would be wrong to pretend we haven't found it hard and there have been moments when it's been extremely difficult. We should be winning big races and we haven't been doing that. This year is going to be very quiet in terms of group ones, which is how we measure ourselves.

We won nine group ones and three classics in 2005 and we were still told it was a bad year, so this one is going to be shocking."

Possibly the most worrying aspect of the season has been the almost total absence from the course of a huge team of two-year-olds . . . and very few of them are entered in the big autumn juvenile trials.

Unless there is a rapid and sudden turnaround in fortune it opens the possibility of next season being just as sparse as this one and without Godolphin having any real competitive presence in the major classics.

It is difficult to pinpoint one specific reason as to why things have suddenly got so 'shocking' for Godolphin, but there are some fairly viable choices. Dettori alluded to the presence of an illness in the stable when he spoke at Goodwood. "It's no secret that the horses weren't very well, nor performing as they should."

The one stable strategy of placing all the horses with a single trainer, Saeed bin Suroor, is fraught with risk and almost akin to investing your whole pension plan in the shares of one company. If a horse suffers a bad infection then there is possible wipe out for the whole string.

Godolphin's main rivals such as the Aga Khan and Coolmore operate a more diversified training strategy which spreads the downside more evenly.

A second problem this year has been the failure of the 'Chelski' strategy . . . the expensive purchases of recent seasons have largely underachieved. Bought in stars such as Shawanda, Palace Episode and Silcas Sister have all been strangers to the winner's enclosure this season and this is a trend unlikely to be broken any time soon.

But perhaps the most dangerous and long-term structural issue that the Dubai operation faces is the business difficulty that has emerged with their main rivals, Coolmore. Sheikh Mohammed has become increasingly frustrated by the lack of support Coolmore extends to his flagship Dubai World Cup festival in March, as well as an apparent reluctance to buy yearlings from his breeding farms.

Because of this Godolphin has stopped buying horses by Coolmore stallions, which is the equivalent of Roman Abramovich boycotting footballers that play in Spain or Italy. Given that nearly half of Godolphin's group one winners have been by those very same stallions it may well be that noses are being sacrificed to spite faces.

The good news is that the stable strike rate in the last 10 days date is almost 50 per cent. They have entries in two of the group ones at York, in Tuesday's Juddmonte Stakes and the Yorkshire Oaks on Wednesday. The problem is that archrivals Coolmore look to have these stitched up with Dylan Thomas and Alexandrova.

If the present revival is not maintained then the end of the season may come very quickly for Godolphin.