The Curragh’s feature race on Friday night, the Ballyogan Stakes, provided a timely reminder of the training capabilities of Eddie Lynam. He took the Group 3 six-furlong contest with Soffia, the Lady O’Reilly-owned filly, who progressed yet again with a new career best on her 13th start.

A listed winner over five furlongs at Naas on her previous run, Soffia showed plenty of speed again and held what looked to be a comfortable lead heading inside the final furlong. She did come back to the runner-up Dans Dream, but she probably picked up again when that British raider got close and she was game in the finish.

She is now three from three at the Curragh, two of those wins coming over six furlongs including the “Bold Lad” Sprint Handicap on Irish Champions Weekend last season.

Yet it was interesting to hear Lynam suggest she might want to go back to five furlongs now. There are plenty of options over that trip, including the newest Group 1 on the Irish calendar, the Flying Five Stakes, later in the season on Irish Champions Weekend.

Whatever Lynam decides to do, you’d trust it to be the right decision. The County Meath-based trainer has earned recognition around the racing world for his handling of sprinters, training out of a country where the discipline has never really been truly fashionable.

In the past five seasons, including this one so far, Lynam has sent out 75 winners, with 55 of those wins coming over distances of five or six furlongs. This time span doesn’t include Lynam’s sensational 2014 season when he trained Sole Power and Slade Power to win two Group 1s each.

The pair famously combined to take the King’s Stand Stakes (Sole) and Diamond Jubilee Stakes (Slade) at Royal Ascot that season. In between those wins the two-year-old filly Anthem Alexander won the Queen Mary. Given the size of his string, that return has to go down as one of the great Royal Ascot training performances.

With regard to both ‘Powers’, the pair remain anomalies in the role of honour for both of those Group 1 sprints at the Royal meeting. Sole Power’s two wins in the King’s Stand remain the only Irish successes in that race in 31 years, since Vincent O’Brien won with Bluebird in 1987.

Slade Power is one of three Irish-trained winners of the Diamond Jubilee Stakes since 1993 (Vincent O’Brien again the previous winning trainer with College Chapel). The other two winners, Starspangledbanner and Merchant Navy, were both established top class sprinters in Australia before being transferred to Aidan O’Brien.

It is also worth recounting that Sole Power was bought by Lynam for a relatively cheap £32,000 while Slade Power, was bred at Lynam’s Dunshaughlin base and bought back at a sale for just £5,000. At €7,500, the latter, now a stallion, commands a higher covering price than he was once evaluated.

Soffia, a four-year-old, is now coming into the same stage of her career which both Sole Power and Slade Power began to prosper at the highest level. She is exciting for her progressive profile but she is just as much as exciting because she is a classy sprinter in the care of Lynam.

Things haven’t exactly slowed down since Punchestown for Willie Mullins’s team. There has been 33 runners sent out from Muine Beag in the last two weeks and 14 of them have come back with a win. In fact, in a logistical sense, Mullins has been as busy as ever with runners in three different countries in the past four days, on the flat and over jumps.

The highlight win was Mr Adjudicator, who won the Grade 2 Prix La Barka at Auteuil on Sunday, seeing off stablemate and a previous winner of the race in Bapaume. It was Mullins’s sixth win in the race in the last eight years. The David Bobbett-owned five-year-old looked like he might struggle this season as a lot of non-novice five-year-olds do, but he has been handled brilliantly by Mullins, kept fresh and sent out to win a €100,000 handicap hurdle at Punchestown and now taking this Grade 2. He effectively only had five runs last season so is poised for a flat campaign now, and he could easily score a big handicap off his current mark of 81.

With regard to the flat, Mullins perhaps scored a more significant winner with Micro Manage, who laughed at his rivals in a three-year-old handicap at the Curragh on Friday evening. He was winning off a mark of 91, and received an 18lbs rise for the effort but it was only his third ever run, his first of this season, and with that he has bundles of scope to progress further.

Winning over a mile and a half on Friday, it’s a pity Micro Manage was making his seasonal debut this late because given the manner of his win, he’d have gone very close in one of the Derby trials and could easily have come into consideration for a run at Epsom, which would have been exciting.

Alas, there is plenty of options and indeed plenty to look forward to down the line with this son of Rip Van Winkle. One interesting option would be to hold onto him until the Ebor, which is worth £1 million for the first time this year. Off a mark of 109, Micro Manage has the same rating as last year’s winner Muntahaa had going into the one-mile-six-furlong handicap, which is a prestigious enough race on its own, but also has the carrot of guaranteed run in the Melbourne Cup, a race Mullins has clearly looked to aim at in recent seasons.