Pricewise believes there is a stand-out contender for the Cheltenham Gold Cup

Everything is easier to understand in a pigeonhole. Last week Reading were seven points clear at the top of the Championship and were good. Two 3-0 defeats at home and they are bad. The truth was always somewhere in between, but that’s not a very interesting narrative so we always tend to lurch towards extremes.

Nowhere is that more evident than in horseracing, where we all tend to pigeonhole horses as one thing or another without ever stopping to think we might be wrong or that horses have the capacity to change.

Champ won a red-hot running of the RSACredit: Patrick McCann

That became clear to me when Cyrname won the Charlie Hall at Wetherby. All of a sudden he went from a horse many had written off as a right-handed Ascot bully to being a superstar again. Clearly what Wetherby showed was that Cyrname was much more versatile than most of us had pigeonholed him as, but as far as I was concerned it certainly didn’t anoint him as a serious Gold Cup contender either.