Sapphire Princess

The distance sweet spot is clearly 7 furlongs to a mile, where she wins 1 in every 3 races — a much sharper figure than her overall record suggests. That is the kind of stat that matters when deciding where to run a horse next, and it points to a trainer who has a good read on what suits her. G M Lyons, based at Dunsany in County Meath, is not a yard to take lightly — 47 winners on the board this season alone tells you this is an operation that knows what it is doing.

Recent form reads 14-1-4-2-3-3 from her last six races, most recent first, so that 14th-place finish is the latest entry. After winning at Kempton eight months ago, she has not managed to get back to the winner's enclosure, though the cluster of placings before that suggest she has not fallen apart entirely. She raced just one day ago, so she is clearly being kept busy, and the team clearly believes there is more to come. Whether she can rediscover that winning feeling at a mile or under will be the interesting question over the weeks ahead.