Ruby Walsh: Patrick Mullins can have his day on Kilcruit

Dysart Dynamo is Willie Mullins’s first string, but the second, Kilcruit, is not really a second-string

Trainer Gordon Elliott’s horses out early on the gallops at Cheltenham yesterday. Elliott expects to have close to 60 runners at the Festival this week. Picture: Dan Sheridan/Inpho

AT 1.30pm this afternoon, as exciting a bunch of novice hurdlers that have assembled for many years will hurtle through the start at the bottom of Cheltenham’s straight. The traditional roar will greet them for the first time in 24 months, but it will sound like a whisper to those reaching 30 miles per hour as they thunder for the first hurdle.

None of these youngsters will ever have faced preliminaries, tension, or noise as they will today. It will be too much mentally for at least one, if not two of them, but nobody knows how they will react until they have been in the mixing pot. All the dreams will be alive when Dysart Dynamo lifts off in front of Constitution Hill, with Jonbon, Kilcruit and Mighty Potter just behind them.