Willie Mullins was playing a different game to his fellow trainers over the two days of the Dublin racing festival at the weekend – a game of Monopoly, in fact, as he added four more Grade One victories on Sunday to complete a clean sweep of the eight top-level events at the meeting.
It was, even by Mullins’s standards, a remarkable two days and while there were some upsets among his winners on the first afternoon there was more of an air of inevitability about proceedings on day two as El Fabiolo (4-11), in the Dublin Chase, and State Man (2-5), in the Irish Champion Hurdle, completed the rout. The combined price of Mullins’s four-timer was just 8-1 and only that big because Fact To File, at 6-4, turned over his stable companion, Gaelic Warrior, in what ended up as a Mullins match-race for the Grade One Ladbrokes Novice Chase.
