Mullins leads green revolution at Cheltenham with further dominance of Prestbury Cup in store

Hats off: Willie Mullins has spearheaded Irish trainers into a position of dominance at racing's biggest Festival

Michael Verney

March 15 2021 02:30 AM

It’s hard to fathom how far Irish jump racing has come since the 1989 Cheltenham Festival passed without a winner for the raiding party.

Such bleak returns were quite common during those lean times where a winner or two for the week was deemed a success, but they are a distant memory when the current landscape is analysed with Irish dominance at every corner.

The concept of the Prestbury Cup – pitting Irish-trained runners against their British counterparts over the 28 Festival races – commenced in 2014 when it was becoming clear that the sizeable battalion heading across the Irish Sea were travelling more in expectation rather than hope.

It was now a fair fight with an unpredictable outcome, but few could have forecasted that the Irish contingent would turn it into a massacre with a record-breaking tally of 19 winners in 2017 the highlight thus far.

Only five years earlier, the British had battered the visiting party 22-5, but the rules of engagement have changed considerably since then and many predict that a star-studded Irish team could garner 20 winners for the first time over the coming week.

That expected dominance is reflected by the fact that most bookmakers are giving the British squad a six-winner head start in their handicap market for the Prestbury Cup, something rarely envisaged when the concept was initiated.

Leading Irish trainer Paul Nolan is in little doubt about the reasons behind the Irish rise with the cream of the crop – including Festival favourites like Envoi Allen and Monkfish – staying on these shores because of the owners at the disposal of big guns like Willie Mullins, Gordon Elliott and Henry de Bromhead.

“There’s no doubt that it’s because of the owners being able to buy the good horses and keep them at home, so it’s all to do with owners. There’s none of us have a yard without owners because we wouldn’t be able to afford it,” Nolan says matter of factly.

“The way the system is gone, the owners can buy these good point-to-pointers or decent horses from Derby or Land Rover sales and we can afford to keep the better horses at home.”

That was not the case in years gone by with British powerhouses like Nicky Henderson, Paul Nicholls and Jonjo O’Neill reaping the dividends, but the rise of the Michael O’Leary-backed Gigginstown House Stud, JP McManus, Joe Donnelly, Valerie and Noel Moran as well as a host of other big hitters means that the best of the best often ends up in Ireland.

Tipperary native Fergal O’Brien, who rates Imperial Alcazar as his leading chance of Festival success in Thursday’s Pertemps Final, knows both sides of the coin quite well after moving to England as a 16-year-old.

O’Brien, who spent 18 years with Nigel Twiston-Davies before setting up his own successful training base, acknowledges that “there’s more money in Ireland” and that underlines the reason for such unprecedented success in the jumps game.

“The better horses just stay in Ireland with the likes of Willie Mullins and Gordon and then they are buying the good French horses as well. I just think there’s more money in Ireland,” O’Brien says of the noticeable change in jump racing’s pecking order.

“There was a time there in Ireland that no matter who you were, if you had a good horse it was sold to England, Gordon Richards or whoever bought him, that was the way it went. But now you have JP McManus, Willie’s people and Gigginstown, there just seems to be a good bit more money in Ireland and they want to keep their horses there.”

O’Brien has 106 horses in his care at present and is flying high from his Gloucestershire base, but he has to adopt a different approach than the biggest hitters with ‘Moneyball’ tactics seeing him lie sixth in the British trainer’s championship, nipping at the heels of Henderson, Paul Nicholls and his former boss Twiston-Davies.

“Over the years we’ve done well with Irish pointers that haven’t won, that’s the market we go for. I haven’t got the owners that will … and that’s not a complaint or a chip, don’t get me wrong. We enjoy buying the horses that have had a few runs in points,” O’Brien says of his buying style.

“Alaphilippe (as low as 7/1 for the Albert Bartlett) is a great example of a horse that we would buy. He’s had five runs in Irish point-to-points and he was 20 grand. They’re the ones that we’ve done well with so they’re the ones that we’ll keep looking at and we’ll let the boys keep kicking on with what they have to do.”

As much as the Prestbury Cup battle is painted as the Irish against the old enemy in a Ryder Cup-style competition, it has really been the emergence of Mullins as the king of jumps racing which has turned fortunes in this nation’s favour.

Of his record-breaking 72 Festival winners, a staggering 55 have come in the past decade to see him crowned Leading Trainer at the Cotswolds on seven occasions as Henderson and Nicholls get left in the shade of the Closutton maestro.

Only Elliott, who will play no part this year with Denise Foster taking the Cullentra reins after his training licence was suspended, has been able to keep pace with Mullins to get his hands on the training honours twice (2017-’18) having secured 32 Festival winners since his first in 2011.

A ninth trainers’ title in succession for the Irish looks a formality with Mullins as low as 1/5 to prevail while the grip on the Prestbury Cup has not been relinquished since a maiden win in 2016, including when the neighbours shared the spoils in 2019.

The scoreboard at the bottom of Cheltenham’s parade ring has made for grim reading for the home side in recent years with Henderson admitting that he wished he hadn’t watched last month’s Dublin Racing Festival as the wealth of talent in Mullins’ care left him rather weak at the knees.

“They just came up with another blockbuster. You suddenly think ‘Crikey, I thought I was going to win that’ and all of a sudden Willie has come up with something and ‘What are we going to do now?’ We’ve got to do our best, it’s been the same for a few years,” Henderson said of the tricolour’s emergence at the Cotswolds.

“That scoreboard that is down at the bottom of the parade ring, when it’s got the English and the Irish flag and the numbers – it’s pretty daunting when the score is 11-5 or something. Then you feel you are fighting a losing battle, but I’m not going into this thinking we’re fighting a losing battle.”

With 12 of last 13 Leading Jockey awards also coming back across the water, this truly is a golden generation for Irish National Hunt racing. It won’t last forever, as nothing does, but sit back and enjoy it as it promises to continue in some style over the next four days.