'It was a crazy week when JP McManus bought him but there's no added pressure – apart from the pressure from myself'

Connor King looks admiringly at his five-year-old winning hurdler Grey Jude. "I don't think it matters whether you have two horses or 20," he says. "You will always find something that needs to be done."

Grey Jude is exactly half the racing string of horses that King trains in the nicely named townland of Mantlehill Great, overlooking the equally nicely named village of Golden in south Tipperary. 

The other half of his stable, the high-class novice chaser he calls Mal but who is known to the outside world as Oscars Brother, is heading to Cheltenham for the Brown Advisory Chase next week, an excursion that looks far from a fool's errand.