Patsy's Pride

The recent form makes things no easier to explain away. Looking at the last six runs, the finishing positions read 12th, a blank, 7th, 8th, 7th, and 10th working back from yesterday's latest effort. There is no obvious upward curve there, no sign of a horse creeping closer to the frame. The one gap in the sequence — that dash in the record — suggests a race that ended early for one reason or another, which only adds to the sense that things rarely go smoothly. Racing just one day ago, Patsy's Pride is clearly still being campaigned actively, which at least tells you the team has not given up.

The yard behind the horse is trained by Ms Claire O'Connell, operating out of Ashbourne in County Meath, and it is not as though the stable is struggling — four winners on the board already this season shows the operation knows how to get a horse ready to win. That makes Patsy's Pride something of a puzzle, because the problem does not appear to be the training. Sometimes a horse simply needs everything to fall right — the right race, the right conditions, the right day — and that moment has not arrived yet. Whether it ever does is the question that keeps the yard running horses like this. Hope, in racing, is remarkably durable.