IT looked like Order Of St George was back to his best in the Comer Group Irish St Leger Trial at the Curragh on Saturday.

The odds-on favourite he may have been, but this was not a formality. Aidan O’Brien’s horse faced formidable opposition in the progressive Rekindling and the talented Renneti and last year’s Irish Leger winner Wicklow Brave, who was rated just 5lb lower than the favourite.

The market did not appear to be certain whether the son of Galileo should be a 1/2 shot or not, but he dismissed all doubts with a turn of foot at the two-furlong marker that put the race to bed and put him into the record books as a three-time winner of the race, a hat-trick-completer.

Order Of St George is that rare beast, a stayer with a turn of foot. If the ball had hopped a little differently, he would be a dual Gold Cup winner at Ascot now, and all the talk would be of Yeats’ footsteps.

As it stands, he is surely on track for another crack at Wicklow Brave in the Irish Leger, a race that he won as a three-year-old in 2015, by 11 lengths, doing handsprings, the first three-year-old to win it since Vinnie Roe won his first in 2001.

After that, another crack at the Arc is surely on the cards.

He was the third member of the famous Aidan O’Brien 1-2-3 in the race last year, so why not? If the ground came up just a little softer than it did last year, you just never know.