Ballysax Lil Mick

What makes the Tipperary win particularly interesting is that it came at a track where Ballysax Lil Mick had clearly found its comfort zone. The recent form reading 14-6-2-–-5-1 tells a dramatic story of its own: a winner, then a fifth, then a gap through the card, then second, then sixth, then fourteenth. That is a horse with very good days and very difficult ones, and it asks the obvious question of what brings out the best in it. The break of 65 days since that last run is modest — enough time to freshen up without going completely cold.

Trainer Katy Brown has sent out 1 winner this season, and Ballysax Lil Mick is it. That is not a yard firing on all cylinders, but it does mean the team clearly knew what they were doing when they aimed this horse at Tipperary that day. Jockey Killian Leonard has been the regular partner, winning 1 from 7 rides together — that is 14%, or roughly 1 in 7, which is actually a more respectable number than the overall career record suggests. The partnership seems to be finding its feet.

The one puzzle worth noting is that Ballysax Lil Mick has never won at its most common level of competition, going 0 from 5 at that grade. The Tipperary win came elsewhere in the programme, which suggests there may be a very specific set of conditions this horse needs to perform — the right track, the right day, the right ride. At eight years old, there may not be endless chances left to find it again, but the fact that it has now done it once means nobody involved will be giving up on the search.