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Frankel and Tom Queally (pink cap) winning Newbury's Greenham Stakes on 16 April (Getty)

Listening to Cecil - and just as revealingly absorbing his body language - a few days before the 2,000 Guineas is a fascinating exercise.

Self-effacing at the best of times, and never given to bold affirmations of the talent of any of his horses, he nonetheless exudes plenty of confidence that Frankel is a pretty special animal.

Cecil must know. now 68, won his first 2,000 Guineas back in 1975. He has picked up the Derby four times, and the equivalent for fillies, the Oaks, on eight occasions. According to his own website he has 389 wins and 35 Classic successes behind him.

He has won top races in France, Ireland and United States, and has more Royal Ascot winners (72) to his name than any other trainer. Cecil has achieved all this despite a long lean spell from the start of the millennium.

He initially coped well when a breakdown in his relationship with Sheikh Mohammed led, in 1995, to the powerful owner removing all his horses from Cecil's vast Warren Place establishment in Newmarket.

Then, in 2000, his twin brother David, a chronic alcoholic, died of cancer. Between 2001 and 2005 Cecil failed to land a single Group One race. By September 2005, having split from his second wife, he found himself 94th in the trainers' championship.

These were worrying times, but Cecil plugged on, : "I could retire and become a member of White's Club [the exclusive Mayfair establishment] and sit there with a glass of port and some stilton and talk all day long about what I've done. But who's interested? Least of all me."

In 2007, he revealed he had been fighting his own grim battle against stomach cancer for nine months, but later that year he was back with a vengeance, on an emotional June day at Epsom.

Since then, it's been just like the good old days for Cecil, whose nervousness ahead of Saturday's race is endearing. He seems like a teenager before a big date, not the man who has been described as the finest British trainer of the past 50 years.

Cecil at Royal Ascot in 2001, during a tough period on and off the racecourse (Getty)

"You always worry a little bit about things going wrong," he says.

"I've had so many horses prior to big races, and coming to the last week we've had setbacks. You never quite know what's going to happen, you have to accept things and get on with it. Unless you have a little bit of butterflies and things it's not worth doing it. I'm getting used to it but you never completely get used to it."

Frankel is a big, muscular brute of a horse, unbeaten in four races. He has been favourite for Saturday's race since confirming himself the champion juvenile of 2010 with victory in the last October.

But there were some signals in his only appearance as a three-year-old, , that might have given hope to some of his rivals.

Channel 4's John Francome warned punters on the day that Frankel was sweating up at the start - rarely a good thing - and pulled very hard under Queally at the start. Then, when finally reaching optimum galloping pace, he hung his head to the right for a furlong or two.

None of that is of any concern to Cecil, however.

"At Newbury he was ready for a race but he wasn't tuned up for it. People criticise the way he won. They said he got upset, which he didn't. He was very, very good and did very, very well," says the 68-year-old trainer.

"He hadn't been on the grass since last year. The all-weather is a tremendous help but I always run them on the bit on the all-weather, and I would like to think he would be a much better horse on Saturday then when he came out and had his introduction."

Frankel is again likely to run with a cross noseband, which is designed to keep his head down when the jockey pulls at the reins.

It is unusual to see any Cecil horses with additional bits of headgear, but the trainer points out his gives nearly all his horses cross nosebands.

Nor should anyone tempted by prohibitive odds of 1-2 be concerned by the horse's ungainly head carriage at Newbury - no more than his natural reaction when the reins are applied, says Cecil.

"I think he's grown up a lot. He is precocious and you could set him alight but he's helped us. We've got to keep him switched off and hopefully he's going to be easier as the year gets on," he explains.

Cecil earlier this month with one of his most loyal supporters, owner Khalid Abdulla (Getty)

"He's very relaxed and he's good in his cantering. When the adrenaline goes he can be a little bit more fiery but on the whole he's pretty good. The trouble is he's got a very long stride, an extraordinary stride when you move him behind [other horses]. He doesn't put his hind legs that far underneath him but he seems to cover an awful lot of ground with his front legs.

"If you're going a normal gallop with him he's slightly restricted because he's got this very long gait. If you can let him just go on and he can use himself as he wants to then he's more relaxed. I don't think it's a problem and hopefully on Saturday he will prove that there isn't."

Frankel completed his final piece of work on Tuesday, tucked in behind a lead horse and allowed to race clear for the last furlong.

Abdulla also owns Rerouted, who will run in the Guineas for trainer Barry Hills and should be able to provide some early pace for the favourite.

"I think he'll probably run very well on his own merit," says Cecil of Rerouted, a 66-1 shot. "Obviously I'd like a decent sort of sensible pace and if I don't get it I'm quite happy to do it myself. We'll just see how it turns out. He could do it if he had to; I'm hoping we don't have to."

Among the chief dangers to Frankel are the two Irish raiders. Pathfork, trained by in Moone, County Kildare, is also unbeaten and will be making his seasonal bow. O'Brien's has already been handed one beating by Frankel, at Newmarket last October, but rebounded from that to win a Group One race in France a fortnight later.

Shrewdly, Cecil chooses not to expand on who he believes is his greatest challenger, though he has certainly looked at them: "What one does is go through the intended runners and try to pick holes in them, and try to forget about your own."

In reality, trying to forget about Frankel is not really an option as the hours tick down until Saturday afternoon.

Cecil's final comment sums up the glorious unpredictability of his job: "There's not such a thing as a racing certainty and Saturday will tell us a lot more."