Off The Jury

Trained by Mickey Bowen out of Haverfordwest in Pembrokeshire — a yard that has sent out 47 winners already this season, so clearly knows how to get a horse ready — Off The Jury was an expensive purchase at the Punchestown sales and arrives with a background as a point-to-point winner. Bowen described him early on as a big, scopey type with a chaser's future, someone who would "have a season hurdling" before moving on to fences. The raw material is clearly there. The problem is translating it into a result on the racecourse.

His regular rider David Maxwell, who also owns him, has been on board for eight of those fourteen races and is yet to steer him to victory. Maxwell's post-race comments paint a vivid picture of the frustrations involved. At Wetherby he described fighting with the horse the whole way round — hauling on his left rein to stop him drifting, battling a horse that was "hanging the whole way down the back" and then doing it again in the home straight. At Doncaster, even when the race appeared to be there for the taking on paper, it slipped away. "On all the form he should have won but he didn't," Maxwell said afterwards. That is about as honest a summary as you'll hear from an owner-jockey who had just watched his own horse come up short.

His most recent form reads 2-2-2-3 across his last four completed races — consistently thereabouts, never quite over the line. He raced just yesterday and remains active. The pieces keep fitting together except the last one. Off The Jury has talent, everyone around him seems to agree on that, and he races at a decent level where Class 3 competition is no pushover. At some point the question stops being whether he can win and starts being whether he will.