Maldevious

That said, the recent form figures are worth a second look. In the last six races, Maldevious has finished fourth on four separate occasions, which is the kind of consistency that suggests the horse is doing its job — just not quite enough of it. Those repeated fourth-place finishes paint a picture of a horse that travels into contention, raises hopes, and then gets outbattled in the closing stages. It raced just yesterday, so it is clearly fit and active, and the team at Norton will be hoping that one of those near-misses eventually turns into something more.

Maldevious is trained by Brian Ellison, whose yard in North Yorkshire has been in good form this season with 43 winners on the board — a healthy total that shows the stable knows how to get horses winning. That makes Maldevious something of an outlier in the yard, a horse that has not yet found a way to match the results its stablemates have been producing. At Class 4 level — the middle tier of British racing — it has been tried three times and come up short on each occasion. Whether a drop in grade might finally unlock a first victory is the question the team will be asking themselves.