Willie Mullins all-star string lead the Irish challenge
(Picture: Getty Images)As home defeats go, few can have been more chastening than last year’s Prestbury Cup.
The scoreline of 23-5 in favour of Irish trainers over their British counterparts at last year’s Cheltenham Festival was a damning indication of which side of the Irish Sea the power currently lies in jump racing.
All the indications are of another greenwash this week. In the battle to be Festival champion trainer, Willie Mullins is odds-on favourite ahead of fellow Irishmen Gordon Elliott and Henry de Bromhead.
Nicky Henderson is the most highly fancied of the British trainers at 10-1, while Paul Nicholls, the event’s dominant force in the early 2000s, is 50-1 and his former understudy and rising star of British trainers, Dan Skelton, is even less fancied at 66-1.
And all this despite Skelton bringing his best crop of horses to the Festival to date. Last month, he said: “This is significantly the best team we’ve had in terms of quality. To have players in the big chases I think almost highlights where we have got to and where we are continuing to aim at.”
Shifting the Emerald Isle from the top spot looks unlikely to happen for a while yet.
As Nicholls put it: “Things won’t change in a year or anything like that. They’ve got a huge squad and it could be 20 or 25 [Irish winners]. We’ve got to do our best and the Irish will have huge numbers of runners, a lot more than we’re going to have this year.”
The reality is the Irish simply have the better horses — almost across the board — although Nicholls, who will have his lowest number of entries in the Festival since 2004 when it took place over three days, is adamant that will shift in time.
“It goes in cycles,” he said. “If you go back 10 or 12 years to when I had all those good ones and the British were winning all the races, in another 10 years it might go back that way again. But it will not happen overnight.”
Picking out the British bankers is not easy. Henderson’s Shishkin is rightly the odds-on favourite in the Champion Chase, in which the trainer is targeting a seventh win, but Mullins offers some solid opposition.
From a British perspective, the opening trio of races look promising, the Henderson-trained Constitution Hill, Alan King’s Edwardstone and Does He Know, trained by Kim Bailey, could all get momentum going with wins for the home trainers.
But that trio of races is swiftly followed by Rachael Blackmore and Honeysuckle — and what feels like the start of the inevitable 2022 Irish dominance. There are other British hopes: Skelton’s Protektorat in the Gold Cup or his Too Friendly in the Juvenile Handicap Hurdle or else Nicholls’ Bravemansgame.
A change in the way jumps horses are handicapped from a year ago does at least offer the British some hope in taking on the Irish.
Dominic Gardiner-Hill, head of handicapping at the BHA, explained: “From a handicapping perspective, last year [at the Festival] was disappointing. That was a catalyst for analysis. Professional pride would want a slightly more equitable Cheltenham.
“This is not anti-Irish, we are not trying to stop them. Our work as handicappers is to provide every horse with a chance of being competitive. The brutal truth is at the moment the Irish have the majority of the best horses in the horse population.”
