First Cheltenham then the world – conquering Cotswolds next for Joseph O'Brien

It’s a question we’re hearing increasingly frequently, essentially because the implied response is somehow so predictable and yet still so indeterminate.

Where will Joseph O’Brien be in ten or 15 years? Imagine. It’s the sheer scope of the possibility that makes the rhetorical poser such a fascinating prospect.

Being human, of course, there is a chance he will by then be a bar-stool bore, subjecting all and sundry to chapter and verse of the time he conquered Oz, stealing his old man’s thunder the same way he would do in an Irish Derby months later.