No romance, no sentiment: Michael O'Leary stays true to the end with Tiger Roll

For the first time in a generation, they booed the winner. But they weren’t jeering Delta Work, the gallant, mud-spattered victor of the Glenfarclas Chase – the Crazy Golf of Cheltenham week.

They were heckling Tiger Roll’s missed opportunity to go out with a final triumph – a chance scuppered by Michael O’Leary’s willingness to run a Gold Cup-level stablemate against the public’s equine darling. Tiger Roll “went out on his sword” all right, as O’Leary suggested, but for many in the murk of a wet March day he also went out on an anticlimax.

The great Tiger Roll tale of five festival wins and two Grand National victories has reached its end. It was always an easy narrative to like. His longevity, heart, intelligence and pluck threatened to match Red Rum’s record of three Aintree wins. But the National – the defining contest of his fine career – was also a battleground between O’Leary and the Aintree handicapper, whose latest assessment of the 2018 and 2019 winner was denounced by the owner of Ryanair as “idiotic” and “absurd”.