Smaller is better for Murphy
It has been a frustrating time this season for most trainers as the weather has conspired to wreak havoc on their best laid plans.
Pat Murphy, originally from Hospital in Co. Limerick and who now trains from a purpose-built base at East Garston in Lambourn, is a man for whom frustration has been a bedfellow throughout his training career but it is not something which gets the 52-year-old down.
Murphy has seen too much in his life to allow a little unplanned irritation to upset him. He has overcome terrible personal tragedy in the shape of the death of his 14-year-old daughter Melissa in February 2001 and the subsequent disintegration of his marriage to continue to forge a career in training.
It may be that in the years following Supreme Glory’s victory at Chepstow in December 2001, things were a little thin for Murphy with much of his success achieved by ‘moderate’ horses on the all-weather circuit in the UK, but a recent change of tack on his behalf may change all that.
He now only has 12 horses in his Lambourn yard, but he’s not unhappy with that.
“I am in an incredibly lucky position by comparison with other trainers because I own my own place. The banks don’t own any of it and neither does anyone else,” he says, adding that if he is lucky and many other are not, then it is the fault of racing itself.
“I think that racing should have been very brave eighteen months or two years ago and culled out the bottom tier of horses – particularly on the flat. There is too much racing and too much bookmaker fodder — you watch it every day on the all-weather; people give out there is no money for prizemoney and yet here we are running five or six races every single day for a pittance,” Murphy insists.
“Personally I did not want to do that and I got rid of those horses. Yes I am in a lucky position because I don’t have to fill every box in my yard, but I got rid of the horses I thought would struggle. From my own point of view racing should not have pandered to those horses.”
Now able to focus more intently on his reduced string, he is able to plan better and more coherently and he has been looking forward to this season with renewed vigour. He is “quite keen to get going now after a pretty tough December,” he says
It has, he maintains, been “very frustrating indeed,” as there was no rain in the UK until very early in November and there was only really three weeks of racing on the proper ground before everything froze up.
“Plenty of horses only had one run and that was as far as they got. Of course we are all in the same boat, but it does make it tougher for sure,” he says, adding that this was particularly so in terms of the preparation of Maktu for the Welsh National.
“You work towards the main day from the start of the season, basically. I had hoped to get two runs into him – his second run being at Chepstow on Dec 4, but that was abandoned. Now that didn’t concern me at all because he is quite an easy horse to keep fit, but then with the Welsh National itself being postponed another two weeks, all of a sudden you’re stuck because it is two extra weeks you hadn’t counted on.
“It was a case of just letting him down gently and then bringing him back up again. He’s not the most difficult horse in the world to get fit, and keep well. He is a very athletic horse and a clean-winded horse, so that is not the concern.
Maktu was bred by the late George Palmer who used to be a neighbour of Murphy’s when he trained near Bristol and, in fact, he sent the horse’s grand-dam to the Irishman to be trained.
“It was in my very early days of training and she was a right old madam. I won a few races with her, so I had a good relationship with George. When it came to this horse, George actually had him with Paul Cole as a two-year-old on the flat and somewhere along the line he ended up being given time and two years down the road he ended up with me, despite the fact I hadn’t had George as an owner for quite a few years. George had this thing in his mind at the time about the horse being a Grand National horse – and that was when he was only a four-year-old. I sort of went along with it at the time because the world was his oyster then. But back then he was pig ignorant; if you put a flight of hurdles in front of him and he met it right then he fly it, but if he didn’t then he’d just gallop through it. On his first run over hurdles, even though on paper it didn’t look like he ran well, the jockey Leighton Aspell came back in and said ‘when this fella gets to grips with the job he’ll do well because he has a fair engine in him.’
“In his second run he buried Leighton at the first at Chepstow and Leighton came into the yard the following day and suggested we school him over baby fences. We did and he’s never schooled over a hurdle since and never looked back either.”
But then the horse “got a sniff of a leg – and I mean a sniff because it was nothing really – but we gave him a year off.” That, he maintains, was the best thing that ever happened to him.
“Because he was such a big, weak horse at the time with a brain which was scrambled, it was the right thing for him. He came back from that a much stronger horse and was far more mature mentally and physically. He won first time back over hurdles and he should have won second time. He won again third time and should have won fourth time. So in his first season back he only had four runs and it is very interesting – hindsight, of course, being what it is – that the handicapper never got him.
“That second race back was at Chepstow, Wayne Hutchinson rode him and he will admit that he should have won. He sat way too far out of his ground and gave him way too much to do. He was absolutely flying at the finish and I said to the owners that day that we would reconvene back at the track in two years time to have a crack at the Welsh National.
“That plan was at the back of my mind all the time. He just seemed to me like a horse with bags of stamina and a huge heart. Once he got his jumping together that was always going to be the plan.”
Murphy says that when Maktu started over fences he made mistakes early on, but it was exuberance and ignorance rather than anything else that got him in trouble. But he learned and the trainer says a lot of the thanks for that goes down to Leighton Aspell “who gave him a right good education.” Unfortunately George Palmer died the week the horse won his first race at Chepstow, but the horse now runs in his wife Marilyn’s colours and she and her friends own the horse now. They are all from the Bristol area and Chepstow is their local track, so the Welsh National is their local big race and a very appropriate target to aim for.
The trainer says the horse is quite a different character at home than he is at the track.
“I ride him myself all the time at home and he spooks at everything. Yet, you put a fence in front of him and he just pricks his ears and away he goes. More importantly, he pulls hard at home and he has quite a soft mouth so I have to ride him with a bitless bridle and I’ll tell you it usually is a good tug of war between us. I reckon I always win only because he allows me to. He’s not the most straightforward at home, but on the racecourse he’s a thorough professional, basically.
“This year the aim is the Welsh National and maybe one or two other staying chases later on. Then we will bring him in a bit later next year and train him with one race in mind – the Grand National.
As for his plan for the race itself, Murphy maintains the very most important part of the race is the start.
“It is easier to drop back into a position than to try and make ground forward into a position and I’ve been saying as much to his jockey Michael Murphy – who is from Athlone and is actually a second cousin of mine, but that’s not why he’s riding – who rides really well over fences for a claimer. I’m happy to have him up on the horse as he’s won twice on him and in the other race he was beaten a short head, so I’d be a brave man to take him off.”
Pat Murphy is a contented man right now and he is, he says, “very happy where I am with my horses and I am very happy with Maktu.”
He may well be even happier later this afternoon. “To make a plan two or three years beforehand and to actually see it through is an achievement in itself. If we were to win it, then that would be something else.”
