Aidan O’Brien is a superb trainer. You name it: he has won it. The Derby nine times, the Irish Derby 15. The 2000 Guineas ten times, the Irish 2000 on a dozen occasions. This year he passed the worldwide total of 400 Group One or Grade One victories.

He is an innately modest man who always credits every member of his team and suggests the big decisions are made by ‘the Lads’ of the Coolmore operation, John Magnier, Michael Tabor, Derek Smith, et al. But that doesn’t mean Aidan cannot be extravagant in praising his winners, notably the progressive youngsters: the multi-billion dollar operation that is Coolmore is, after all, in the stallion-making business. Many have been praised along the way as the fastest he has trained, the most resolute, the most consistent.

But his language last Saturday after City of Troy won Newmarket’s Dewhurst Stakes on Future Champions Day was from a different lexicon. It was as if he was describing an animal arrived from outer space with something more than flesh and blood about his makeup. Labelling him unequivocally as the best two-year-old he has ever trained, Aiden said City of Troy hated the gluey ground ‘but the stride on him is incredible. He just never gets tired. I’ve never before seen a horse that doesn’t get tired. I’ve never had a horse we don’t know where the limit is. We push them to the limit but we can never find his limit’.

And it wasn’t just Aidan. The octogenarian ex-bookmaker Michael Tabor, a man who knows how to write a betting slip with plenty of noughts, said: ‘I know the way Aidan speaks but we’re all optimists. This horse is special – the real deal.’ Even jockey Ryan Moore, who would as soon be heard gushing about a horse’s potential as Jacob Rees-Mogg would be saying complimentary things about the BBC, agreed that the first time he had ridden City of Troy at The Curragh, ‘He did something a horse had never done to me before: I couldn’t stop him.’

It tends to be said about the Coolmore operation that while they have had many top-class horses, they have not yet had their own Frankel, the superstar unbeaten in 14 starts, so when Tabor says this could be the one, we have been warned. The bookies are offering no better than 10-1 for City of Troy to be the first since Nijinsky to win all three of the 2000 Guineas, the Derby and the St Leger, and his sire, Justify, did after all win the American equivalent of the Triple Crown.

Irish trainers of a rather different stamp have been making a habit lately of winning the Cesarewitch handicap, the 2m 2f second leg of the autumn double and a race that has tended to be one where jumps trainers show the flat handlers what they can do with a decent stayer. Martin Pipe had a fine record in the 34-horse cavalry charge, as has Nicky Henderson. Three of the last six runnings have been won by Ireland’s Willie Mullins, who was trying hard again on Saturday with no fewer than five runners. Success went instead, though, to the 30-horse yard of his nephew Emmet Mullins, who at only 33 already has a Grand National winner to his credit with Noble Yeats in 2022.

Young Mullins insists that nobody can make a living out of training racehorses, arguing that you need to be breeding, buying and selling and sometimes betting on them to keep the books straight. That, it seems, requires keeping your cards not too far away from where most people keep their wallets. Visitors to his yard are said not to be given the names of the horses they might see galloping there who will be referred to only as Fred, Fintan, Henry or Heather.

On the strength of Emmet’s high success rate when sending horses over to contest British races I included his ten-year-old The Shunter in my perm for the race, although stupidly I took 10-1 the night before when he started at 14-1. Incidentally, it is just possible that during Saturday’s flat-racing at Newmarket we saw both the winner of next year’s Derby and Grand National. Emmet Mullins disclosed that The Shunter had been entered for the Aintree spectacle last year and pulled out at the 11th hour. All options remain open for 2024 and with the two potentially Derby-bound Dubawi colts Arabian Crown and Ancient Wisdom both scoring impressively on the card to restore some lustre to Godolphin’s season, it was not just City of Troy who went into the notebooks.

Alas, if The Shunter does go for next year’s National it will be against only 33 opponents, with the field being reduced from the previous 40 among some otherwise sensible adjustments planned to make the race safer. Cutting the number of runners seems wrong though. Sheer numbers have always been part of the National’s appeal. Any why do it now, encouraging last year’s protestors to believe they have won a victory?