Seven Towers

The recent form tells an interesting story. Reading from the most recent race backwards — 9, 3, 3, 3, 6, 3 — you can see four third-place finishes in there, with one poor run of ninth sandwiched in the middle. That ninth is the outlier; on most days, Seven Towers is mixing it with the front runners and finishing just a place or two away from the winner. The puzzle for the team is figuring out what it will take to finally get the horse's head in front.

Seven Towers races out of the Navan yard of Gavin Cromwell, one of the busier and more productive training operations in Ireland right now. Cromwell's team has sent out 96 winners already this season, which is a serious number — that is not a yard that struggles to get horses ready to perform. The fact that a trainer of that calibre keeps running Seven Towers suggests there is genuine belief that a win is coming. Horses are not kept in training for nothing, and a yard firing out winners at that rate tends to know which horses are worth persisting with. Seven Towers raced just one day ago, so this is a horse right in the middle of its campaign, fit and active.

The question mark hanging over Seven Towers is simple: can it convert? Placing four times from six races shows quality and consistency, but racing rewards only one thing — winning. At five years old, there is still time. And if Cromwell's operation, which clearly knows how to win races, keeps the faith, the suspicion is that Seven Towers is closer to breaking through than its blank win column suggests.