Not quite the life of Reilly as Tattersalls' main event gets under way

The distant hum of the auctioneer echoing from the sale ring masks what would have otherwise been a nervous silence around the Left Yard of Park Paddocks.

Even a vendor as experienced as Barry Reilly seems on edge. In under an hour, the Kingman-sired son of his magnificent broodmare Whirly Bird will be offered, and there is little more that anyone can do.

"It’s nerve-wracking for everybody," he says. "I haven’t been on the front line all week but you get bits of reports back, maybe just being told what they want you to hear, in a nice way.

"No-one really knows what’s going to go on here, unless maybe you’ve got a superstar Dubawi out of a Classic winner and everything is right.

"I think the rest of us are feeling our way all the time, just hoping that your horse behaves himself like he’s done at home, and shows himself, and the right people are interested in him."

Reilly and his wife Fiona run Woodcote Stud, a quality-over-quantity operation on the outskirts of Epsom.

Poet's Word is Woodcote Stud's flag-bearerCredit: Mark Cranham

St Leger winner Kingston Hill was born there, while the name of its other illustrious graduate adorns the team’s black and yellow jackets. He happens to be the Kingman’s half-brother Poet’s Word, last year’s conqueror of the Prince of Wales’s Stakes and the King George.

"We sold Poet’s Word for 300,000gns in Book 2, that was a monster amount for a first-season sire (Poet’s Voice)," Reilly says. "We expected to make 100, 120 even with a nice horse. He made that without even blinking.

"The market’s very picky and they’ve got to tick all the boxes. We rear them as well as we can, the vets come and do the scopes and the x-rays. You either get the bad news there or the good news, and all that’s down to us is getting them here.

"If you read all the dispatches these days about what’s key - well behaved, good mind, good movement - if you have one bad show, it might not stop your sale but it can jeopardise it or devalue it.

"To that end, if you’ve got one, there’s pressure, and we normally have one. I can’t imagine the pressure’s so much on those who’ve got ten of them, because you'll always get an 'out'. It’s that saying about all your eggs in one basket. If you drop the basket, that’s it."

The stillness of the scene is occasionally interrupted by the clatter of hooves or a whinny from somewhere around the sales ground. While every precaution can be taken, the experience of staying away from home is a new one for nearly all these equine schoolchildren.

Reilly chuckles before coming up with an amusing analogy.

"It’s like lads going to the pub," he says. "You’ve got the quiet lads who drink steady steady, then you’ve got one there that necks six pints in five minutes and is causing mayhem. Sometimes even the sensible ones will have that bit of a moment."

A full-sister to lot 118 made 200,000gns here two years ago and the family has been extended by another half-sister breeding the top-class juvenile Beckford. Reilly is justifiably firm that he will not be giving his latest offering away.

So it proves as, despite behaving like an old hand in the preliminaries, the auctioneer’s solicitations rise to 190,000gns but the youngster is led away without reaching his reserve.

Reilly’s next minutes are spent dealing with inquiries on the phone. If the Kingman had been a she rather than a he, Woodcote might have kept her to race and add to the broodmare band, but colts are less use to a commercial stud. He is hopeful that a private sale can be arranged before the evening is out.

"He’s a May 21 foal but he won’t have grown another two inches in two weeks time, what do you do?" he says. "You’ve got to bring him here when the people are here and hope for the best.

"Everything’s right about him and he deserves to be here, but it’s always in the lap of the gods."

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