INCREASING the number of lower-grade races over jumps could be an option to give owners and trainers a better chance of competing with the Willie Mullins stable, says senior Irish National Hunt handicapper Sandy Shaw.

Speaking at the launch of the Anglo-Irish National Hunt Classifications [see pages 16-17] this week, Shaw said he is not in favour of imposing any restrictions on the champion trainer, whose horses won 24% of all available prize money in Ireland last season and won 68% of all Grade 1 jumps races.

“You look at Manchester City’s dominance in the Premier League and Willie Mullins is the Pep Guardiola of Irish racing,” Shaw said. “I don’t think there’s any question about that. A lot has been spoken about his domination in the Grade 1s, fair play to him, as far as I’m concerned. He’s a world-class trainer. Like the Premier League, it’s about the horses or players you buy and there’s always a risk taken in doing so.

“Our issue is probably to look further down the chain over here in regard to maybe increasing the amount of races to give trainers further down a better chance of winning. I don’t mean, in any sense, to invent races that block Willie Mullins running horses or restricting the number of horses you can run in Grade 1s.

“In fairness to Willie, he runs his best horses against each other and that’s good for racing. It’d be much worse if he had those horses avoiding each other.

“I think we’re in an era, but a lot of these eras come and go over the years. At the moment it doesn’t look like things are changing too quickly. We have Gordon Elliott there too, as well as Henry de Bromhead, so it’s not just Willie, but I don’t see or want to prevent Willie from winning any more Grade 1s than he’s winning.

“Anyone can try to buy the horses he buys. He has a great team around him who do a great job. What I notice with a lot of the horses he buys from France is that they’re not obvious. They may have just run once or twice.

“Take Gaelic Warrior, as an example. He’d had a few runs in France but was not a standout at the time. They identified him with that potential. Impaire Et Passe had won the equivalent of a bumper at a small track at Nancy. He wasn’t a big talking horse and that’s what I love about how he and his people find these horses. He doesn’t just go for the best horses, like managers go for the best players.

“It’s a bit like Brighton as a football club, picking out players that are there for everyone to get but that not everyone can identify potential in. I wouldn’t go changing anything, it’ll sort itself out in time.”

Novice hurdlers

Six Irish-trained novice hurdlers, rated 150 or above, made it into the Anglo-Irish Hurdle Classification, but no British-trained novice reached that standard last season.

British handicapper Andrew Mealor said: “Ireland largely dominated the novice hurdles at Cheltenham. These ratings are a logical extension of that. This is only the third season we’ve been at 150-plus for the classifications, so there are only two sets of classifications to judge against, but it is the first year there are no British novice hurdlers listed. There were two last year and four the previous year.

“However, the number of novices is down from 11 and 10 in previous years to only six this year. It was probably a below-par year overall for novices.”