Can The Fly do it again?

THE unthinkable happened at last year’s Cheltenham Festival when the Irish raiders achieved a record haul of 14 winners to outscore the home defence for the first time ever in the illustrious history of the great March National Hunt meeting.

Racegoers had never seen such a triumphant Irish invasion of the Cotswolds and there are many punters preparing to wager that similar rich ‘green’ pickings are on the cards next week, especially as Willie Mullins is assembling a raiding party of quite staggering range and depth.

Ireland’s top trainer and the leading handler at the festival in two of the past three years, Mullins has some powerful armoury at his disposal for the annual Olympics of National Hunt racing and, admittedly, loose predictions that he could even reach double figures for the meeting are no longer being dismissed as fanciful.

A measure of the extraordinary firepower at Mullins’ disposal is that he was responsible for a scarcely believable 22 of the original 102 entries for next Tuesday’s Supreme Novices Hurdle – the traditional festival opener – while he will have a host of candidates to fire at virtually every other race over the four days.

In fact, the continuing biggest test for Mullins on the eve of the 2014 festival is juggling his huge raiding party to ensure the best return for the yard, but many racegoers will simply row in behind Ruby Walsh’s chosen pick in those races where Ireland’s champion trainer has multiple starters.

It’s makes perfect sense too as Walsh has been top jockey at Cheltenham in seven of the last ten years and has amassed a record-breaking career haul of 38 festival winners so far. The pair have dominated Ireland’s equivalent to Cheltenham – the Punchestown festival – over recent seasons, but 2014 could mark a Mullins/Walsh takeover of UK’s landmark racing event to a similarly unprecedented level.

Though the festival is only days away, punters have been forced to resort to an educated guessing game in relation to what races some of Mullins’ star battalion will be aimed for, but that only adds to the intrigue of the build up to Cheltenham. In any event, Mullins isn’t the only trainer whose plans are fluid for some of his festival’s big hopes.

At least, there is no ambiguity about the target of Hurricane Fly, one of only two horses – Comedy Of Errors being the other – to have regained the Champion Hurdle and which will attempt to land Tuesday’s feature for the third time in four years. The ante post favourite has only been turned over once (third behind Rock On Ruby two years ago) in his last 17 runs and has twice put young challengers, Our Conor and Jezki, in their place at Leopardstown this season.

The big negative against Hurricane Fly, however, is that only one horse aged 10 (Sea Pigeon in 1980) has landed the Champion Hurdle since 1951, while the record-breaking Grade One winner also has to contend with the strongest field assembled for the big race in over a decade – a combination which is likely to scuttle Mullins’ stable flagbearer.

Jessica Harrington’s Jezki, bound to be made use of, probably lacks that killer turn of foot to land a Champion Hurdle, but the other big Irish contender Our Conor has stronger credentials even if Dessie Hughes’ hope doesn’t have the statistics in his favour either as only two five-year-olds (See You Then and Katchit) have been successful in the past 40 years.

For more, read this week’s Connacht Tribune.