Paul Nicholls is odds-on to win the British trainers’ title for the 13th time and the reigning champion paraded several interesting contenders for the Cheltenham Festival here on Thursday, but the extent to which British yards are currently struggling to match their Irish counterparts was also underlined a few minutes later, as Nicholls suggested that he will have “between 12 and 14 runners” during the four-day meeting this month.
Even 14 runners would represent Nicholls’s smallest Festival team since the fourth day was added in 2005, and he currently has only two entries – Bravemansgame and Stage Star – quoted at single-figure odds. Willie Mullins, by contrast, saddled at least a dozen runners on every day of the 2021 Festival, including 18 on the final afternoon alone, and will expect to return with a similar number this year.
Mullins also has eight likely favourites over the four afternoons, including Galopin Des Champs, who could run in either the Turners Novice Chase or the Brown Advisory Novice Chase and would be the most significant opponent for Nicholls’s Bravemansgame in the latter contest.
Sedgefield
1.00 Lightning Attack
1.30 Where's Hector
2.03 Morningside
2.38 Thatbeatsbanagher
3.13 Manwell
3.48 Twoshotsoftequila (nap)
4.23 Ashjan (nb)
Huntingdon
1.10 Bucephalus
1.45 Chambard
2.20 Signal Point
2.55 Nashville Nipper
3.30 Nocte Volatus
4.05 Queen Of Fame
4.40 King Ferdinand
5.10 Roll With It
“He’s a fantastic-looking horse and he’s done everything right,” Nicholls said of Bravemansgame on Thursday. “We got put in our place by Bob Olinger [in the Ballymore Novice Hurdle] last year [but] he’s improved enormously for a summer and I think he’s going to be even better next year when he’s stronger.
“He’s four-from-four this year and he’s now rated 164, which is a high mark for a novice. He’s got class and he jumps and next year he’ll be a serious contender for the King George and Gold Cup.
“No one knows what will turn up and run, but you can only beat what you’re up against. [Galopin Des Champs] has won his two impressively, he jumps and gallops, but until they meet, you’re never going to know. If he turns up, you’d be nervous, but we’re going into it with a really nice horse.”
Nicholls will look instead towards the big meetings at Aintree and Ayr for some of his better horses, including Clan Des Obeaux and Hitman, who both landed Grade One races at Aintree last season.
“There’s some nice horses to run [at the Festival] and that’s what you want,” he said. “We haven’t got the numbers, and never will have, that Willie and Gordon [Elliott] have got, but Bravemansgame and Stage Star [in the Ballymore Novice Hurdle], it’s really exciting to have horses like those to run, and for the future.”
Overall, Nicholls feels that Ireland’s team is “not going to be far off” its record-breaking total of 23 wins from the Festival’s 28 races in 2021.
“Things won’t change in a year or anything like that, they’ve got a huge squad and it could be 20 or 25, it is what it is, really,” he said. “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, I’d say.
“But it goes in cycles, if you go back 10 or 12 years to when I had all those good ones and [the British stables] were winning all the races, in another 10 years it might go back that way again. But it’s not going to happen overnight.”
