I'm intrigued. Is an over head call standard practice at 'HR or is the normal call 'deadside descending'. Reason I ask is if you call in the overhead just after someone else then you've no real idea who's going to be descending first.
Sorry, I was imprecise with my wording - he did call overhead, descending deadside. You're quite right that this tells us that he should be ahead of us in the circuit (as he turned out to be); had he just called overhead we would probably have called immediately to clarify where he was and what he was doing.
We knew there was other traffic joining overhead, Goodwood Info told us when we told them our intentions. However, we couldn't spot it and were only a mile or so away from starting our descent when his deadside call came (he was arriving from the south, we were arriving from the north - the live side), so a sloppily-flown descent by the other pilot could have put us quite close on crosswind. In this case everything worked according to plan, but I don't like having to trust the other pilot to do the right thing if I haven't managed to spot him. So we called once we were descending to make sure that he really was ahead... he was.