Aidan O'Brien caps worst July in Ireland for 21 years

A week that began with an unsavoury slice of click cricket has ended with Aidan O’Brien being six and out.

The master trainer came close to scooping all three Group One races at Goodwood this week for only the second time in his career, having begun the month by landing the Coral-Eclipse with the brilliant Constitution River.

His big guns have been firing and he is halfway towards repeating the world record 28 Group One triumphs he achieved in 2017. He’s given himself every chance of raising the bar even higher as he is a month ahead of schedule, given that nine years ago he had “only” 14 winners at the highest level at the start of September.

However, not everything has been going to plan for the serial champion trainer. In his native Ireland, he has been left to reflect on his worst July since 2005, and his lowest numbers of winners since the start of May (29) stretching back two decades.

The performances of Scandinavia, Gstaad, Diamond Necklace and Man’s Best Friend on the Sussex Downs in recent days will have calmed those beginning to sense there was something amiss at Ballydoyle but his subdued spell in Ireland is unusual, to say the least, with Timeform suggesting at the start of the week that that the current Flat season is the worst for him since their ‘Run to Form’ metric was introduced in 2012.

His two runners at Galway on Friday night, Port Of Spain and Cosmetic, both missed the target, leaving him with a tally of just six winners from 62 runners on home soil this month.

None of those victors went off bigger than 7-2 and two of them were long odds-on, with Classic hopeful Alpha scrambling home at 1-6 in the Saudi Cup Silver Flash Stakes at Leopardstown.

Alpha was one of 20 runners that O’Brien ran in Listed or Group races in Ireland during the month, with his only other success at this level being Florida Bay. Six of his beaten runners ranged between 4-6 and 100-30 in the betting.

O’Brien has only had such slim pickings in July on one previous occasion since starting training in 1993; when having five winners in 2005. But he only sent out 24 runners on that occasion, so his strike-rate then was a healthy 21 per cent.

O’Brien’s strike-rate of under 10% in Ireland this month has never previously happened this century, at least between the months of May and August. The only exception was in May 2020, when there was no racing because of the Covid pandemic.

A string that usually operates with clinical precision just isn’t firing on all cylinders, at least when it comes to the B, C and D Teams.

Ironically, his barren spell has coincided with his eldest son, Joseph, having the best month of his career, chalking up 33 winners in Ireland, including the Irish Oaks.

Before this year, O'Brien Sr has never had fewer than a dozen winners in July on home soil going back to 2008, chalking up between 23 and 27 on five occasions between 2012 and 2018.

His days of ever achieving 37 again are long gone - he pulled that off in July 1995 when dividing his time between Flat and Jump runners - but you would have got massive odds against him managing so few this month, given the resource and depths of talent at his disposal.

Punters who have kept the faith will have had their fingers burnt, with 36 of his beaten runners having gone off at single-figure odds. Twelve of those started at 13-8 or shorter, six of them being odds-on. Had you blindly put £1 on all of them, you would have lost £43.48, his worst return during a summer month (May to end of September) this century.

O’Brien had been ticking along nicely on home soil since March, chalking up 40 winners from 176 runners (win strike rate 22.72%).

But this month has come his unexpected bump in the road, with the low point being all 22 of his runners being beaten at the Juddmonte Irish Oaks meeting. He also had the dubious distinction of being responsible for the last four home in the headline race.

The show now moves on to August, when O’Brien has ramped things up in recent years. His strike-rate last year was 27 per cent (16 winners from 59 runners) and the year before that a bulging 36 per cent (22 from 61).

It’s unlikely he is contemplating pushing any panic buttons, not that you are likely to find any at Ballydoyle in the first place. But punters could be forgiven for thinking twice before banking on normal service from the sport’s most powerful operation.