Keith Melrose on whether the Brits can stop the Irish dominance in the Cheltenham Gold Cup

Even if the score at the end of the week shows 20-odd races going back to Ireland again, if British trainers can keep the Gold Cup at home then there will be a feeling of pride salvaged.

A look through the field shows a pretty gaping hole in this contingency plan. The home team has only ten of the 25 runners left in the Gold Cup and only one at shorter than 16-1. Basically, unless it rains for Royale Pagaille or Chantry House becomes the horse of his connections’ dreams all of a sudden, then we are relying on Protektorat.

A year or three runs ago, whichever seems least frightening, that prospect would have seemed remote. ‘He needs a break and his head sorting out’ was the gist of a conversation I had with Paul Kealy after Empire Steel duffed up Protektorat at Kelso last February. He won the Manifesto at Aintree a few weeks later, then shaped like the best horse in the Paddy Power Gold Cup and last time won the Many Clouds by a huge margin. Him taking the next step requires a bit of trust but, notwithstanding the black eye his revival has given me, I am far more willing to walk with him than I was.

The Irish challenge is formidable, so much so that Galvin really should not be as short as 4-1. He is put up as the ‘old school Gold Cup type’, which was also the argument Don Poli’s supporters used. The reality is that those sorts only win when the ground is soft (Native River, Coneygree) or it is a weak renewal. Connections say he is a good-ground horse, but I would be praying for rain if I had backed him.

Both A Plus Tard and Minella Indo have form that is in the same realm as anything Allaho, Energumene or even Shishkin can boast, yet neither is being talked up as a superstar on the same scale. It was not stamina that split them last year, it was jumping, and remember too that A Plus Tard was seven and only recently minted as a stayer. He could not have won the Betfair Chase more easily and shaped like the best horse in the Savills, when Rachael Blackmore played a rare bum note by moving forward just as the pace increased.

The market has the right favourite, then, and it does look overwhelmingly likely that this will be a seventh Gold Cup out of eight for Ireland. But the safety in numbers the market purports is arguably a bit misleading, and the only truly plausible Brit should not by any means be taken lightly.

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