YOU’LL have heard this one before, way back in the day, when you were supposed to be listening but of course you weren’t. Here it is again, in admonitory tones: hard work is its own reward.

Your mother, your father, your teacher,your priest told you that, and they were right. But you’ll never hear a trainer tell you that, because in that hard game of endless work they need something extra to sweeten the deal.

So many trainers are forced to embrace that old doctrine, though, grin and bear it while chafing at the binds of being small beer in a champagne world.

The big trainers work hard too, sure, but they get all the fizz. They sit like kings at the head of the table, while down below the salt it is all about fighting for crumbs and yearning for something more sustaining to come your way. Now and then it does; it did for Patrick Neville.

“It was an unbelievable feeling, the best in the world,” says Neville, remembering his glory-day victory with the evocatively named The Real Whacker in last year’s Grade 1 Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase at the Cheltenham Festival.

“Sure we had a party afterwards, but I’m getting a bit old for that, not as good as I used to be. Then at the weekend I went back home to Ballysteen and the local GAA put on a celebration for us.

“My father is a religious man and we went to Mass on the Sunday morning, and the priest said something like ‘we welcome Patrick Neville’ and everyone in the church, 70 or 80-odd, stood up and gave a round of applause. That was a very big thing for my dad, for me.”

Graft

Patrick Neville, former electrical contractor, former small-time Limerick trainer, who went east to make his fortune and became a small-time Yorkshire trainer, parlayed years and years of hard work into one life-affirming reward for all that graft.

There has always been room in jump racing for that sort of relative rags to relative riches story, but opportunities are becoming scarcer, the fairytales fewer and further between. Yet at last Neville saw his name in lights; apt, really, given his origins.

“I served my apprenticeship as an electrician and then worked for myself, built up a firm, had 10 lads working for me at one stage. Horses were my hobby, and then I suppose the hobby just got bigger.

“Then I built my own yard. I wasn’t in it for the money - probably just as well - but for the love of it, it was like a drug.

“Buying young horses, bringing them on, watching them progress, it drove me forward. I bought stores, got people involved in racing for the first time, but any prize money just went into paying the bills. It’s a hard game.”

It’s a frequent complaint. Neville points to various inequities, notably the situation wherein a small trainer pays a similar amount for insurance as a big trainer.

“Smaller trainers need a break,” he says, and he would have been in agreement with the mooted, but now rejected, rule change in Britain that permitted trainers to saddle no more than four runners in big handicaps. It would have only been a small nod to the problems faced by those helping to prop up the pyramid, but every little helps.

“It isn’t the fault of any individual trainers, but the system is wrong,” he says.

Grass roots

“It can be hard to live with for trainers and owners. It makes a hard job that much harder. We should be doing more to help the grass roots of the sport, those trying to get their bread and butter in low-grade handicaps. Racing needs stories of little guys making good, otherwise it can be a bad look for the sport.”

Neville trained his first winner in September 2008, had a fair bit of success with the likes of Grade 3 winner Macville and Kerry National runner-up Rightville Boy, but after just 31 winners in 14 seasons he began to consider his options.

Buoyed by a couple of winners at Perth and Hexham, Neville saw Britain as a land of greater opportunity, and despite being at an age, 50, when most people are settling down into a comfortable rut rather than making a great leap of faith, he moved across the water to Yorkshire in November 2021. This too was hard.

“I thought that if I didn’t do it then, I never would do it,” he says. “There were more chances there for me. However, one offer of a yard fell through when I already had the horses on the ferry, so I eventually arrived in Middleham without a plan, knowing no-one.

“Someone mentioned Ann Duffield. I didn’t know who she was. But 10 minutes later I was in her yard in Leyburn, being shown the gallops, and we clicked straight away. It was a real stroke of luck.”

Neville took the role of Duffield’s assistant, hacked his way through the forest of paperwork required to gain his licence, went back to school to work through the BHA modules.

A year later, he was authorised to be his own man at a yard rented from Duffield, and the old familiar struggle began anew.

Struggle

You can take a man out of the old country, but you’ll never take the old country out of the man, and Neville admits it wasn’t easy to leave behind family and friends. But he can go back and forth when the pull of home is strong, and he has adapted well to being an honorary Yorkshireman.

“I’m still a Limerick man,” he says, almost in self-defence. “But this is a lovely place, it reminds me of Limerick 20 years ago – I don’t feel far from home when I’m here.”

One panacea for homesickness is success, and last season Neville sent out nine winners, the best annual return of his life, underpinned by the emergence of The Real Whacker as a high-class novice chaser.

The gelding cost his trainer €21,000 at the Goffs Arkle Sale in 2019 - “It was a lot of money for me, especially as I bought him for someone who pulled out, so I was left with him” - as a raw three-year-old, and has become the emblem of Neville’s new venture while bearing a name connecting him securely to his past.

Anyone reading this on the west coast of Ireland will know of Eddie ‘Whacker’ Daly, an old-school racecourse celebrity who works with the bookmakers at Thurles, Listowel, Galway and Killarney.

Neville had a horse he liked who needed a name, and he didn’t have to look too far for inspiration.

Honoured

“I’d always meet Eddie at the races, go for a coffee and a bit of craic with him, and I said that I might call this horse ‘Whacker’ after him. Eddie said he’d be honoured.

“Then that night he phoned me and asked if I’d made the name official. I hadn’t. ‘Call him The Real Whacker instead’, says Eddie, and so I did, and here we are.”

The rest is glorious history. The Real Whacker, a relentless front-runner who always needs the first race of the campaign to get his eye in, went to Cheltenham for the Brown Advisory a fancied horse after two wins over fences, and led every step of the way under Sam Twiston-Davies to win the championship event for staying novices.

“I wouldn’t say I get nervous before a big race,” says Neville, “but I’ll always watch it on my own. I’m a bit of a box-walker, a bit restless. I tucked myself away in the owners’ and trainers’ stand and I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.”

The Real Whacker jumped the last fence with a clear advantage over the posse, but the hot favourite Gerri Colombe was hunting him down, closing the gap with every stride.

It was a close-run thing with the official margin a short-head; Neville had come a long way to get to this point, but now it was mere inches that mattered.

Confident

“I was fairly confident he’d kept it,” says Neville, still surrounded by the afterglow, wearing it like an aura. “Then the fella beside me said ‘you’ve got it’. Unbelievable.”

The Real Whacker will return to Cheltenham in March with a puncher’s chance in the Gold Cup itself, although last year’s success did not result in a host of new owners beating a path to Neville’s door, something that perplexed him a little then but does not occupy his mind now.

His gaze is fixed firmly on the next steps towards a bright horizon.

“I’m building nicely here,” he says. “I have 15 horses, wouldn’t mind another dozen or so, took a chance on a few youngsters at the sales. I have a great team around me, recently took on a man to push the marketing side of the business, and I’m not planning another move.

“I’ve never had a big owner to back me but I’ve never questioned my own ability, and I’ll keep trying. I never had a silver spoon in my mouth, I’ve always done it the hard way, hands-on with plenty of hard work, and I’ll carry on that way.”

That’s what small trainers do, what they have to do. Neville knows all about that, but now it’s not all he knows. Hard work is a fine thing, but it doesn’t have to be the only reward.