Guardami Ancora

The five-year-old has placed in four of those six outings, with recent form reading 3-2-6-2-2 before a latest run just yesterday. That sequence of seconds tells its own story: this is a horse that finds itself in the finish, again and again, without quite getting its nose in front. Most tellingly, trainer Mrs C Williams points to a run at Taunton last month where Guardami Ancora would have won — had it not stumbled at the final hurdle. Moments like that are genuinely painful in racing, but they also confirm something important: the ability to win is already there. It just needs a clean run to prove it.

Williams, who operates out of a small yard in Llancarfan in the Vale of Glamorgan and has sent out three winners already this season, is clearly enthusiastic about what she has on her hands. She describes the horse as progressive and, unusually for a five-year-old still finding its feet, says there is nothing immature about the way it goes about its business. It was up with the pace at Hereford on Monday — another encouraging sign, since horses that race prominently tend to control their own destiny rather than relying on gaps to appear.

The questions about its future are interesting ones. Williams is not sure whether chasing — jumping the bigger, more demanding fences — will suit, simply because Guardami Ancora is not a particularly big horse physically. But she is confident that a summer's rest and strengthening will make it a different proposition next season. That is the kind of long-game thinking that separates patient, careful training from chasing quick results, and it suggests the yard has faith in where this horse is heading.

For now, it competes at Class 4 level — the solid middle tier of British racing, where fields are competitive and winners are earned. Zero wins from three races at that level sounds flat on paper, but given the Taunton near-miss and the consistency of those placed efforts, the win feels less like an if and more like a when.