The Irish 2000 Guineas often has a one-sided narrative. Since Aidan O’Brien sent out Desert King to win in 1997, the Ballydoyle handler has been responsible for the winner of half of the renewals since, with 11 wins in all.

Most of these winners were seeking compensation after running at Newmarket but four of them were completing Guineas doubles (Rock Of Gibraltar in 2002, Henrythenavigator in 2008, Gleneagles in 2015 and Churchill in 2017) and that is the club Magna Grecia will be aiming to join on Saturday.

He stands at the top of the market, odds-on, and it’s easy to see why that is the case as, for all that his win at Newmarket part-owed to circumstance, he was still very good on the day. It’s difficult to foresee any of the also-rans at Newmarket flipping form with him now. However, he could face a bigger threat from one of the most unexposed and unknown quantities in the field, Paddy Twomey’s Decrypt.

Two of the previous three renewals of this contest have produced more engaging winners than usual - Awtaad for Kevin Prendergast and Romanised for Ken Condon. Perhaps both of those colts benefitted from being kept at home and brought along with the Curragh classic as their main early-season target.

Decrypt certainly fits the same sort of profile, and his trainer's recent record is intriguing.

Twomey’s statistics over the last few seasons really catch the eye. Clearly adopting a quality-over-quantity approach, the Cashel-based handler has sent out 23 winners from just 82 runs in the last five seasons (including this one), deriving a hugely healthy strike-rate of 28% and a level stakes profit of €42.64.

Last season saw him record his best tally yet (seven winners from 28 runs) but he is already on course to hammer that total this term, having sent out five winners from just 11 runs; some new owners perhaps cottoning on to his efforts.

Those five wins, along with a few placings, are enough to put Twomey in 16th place in the Irish trainers’ championship. To put that into context, Ado McGuinness and Sheila Lavery, the trainers one place ahead of him and one place below him, have had 57 and 35 runners respectively.

The stats offer a black-and-white appraisal but it is worth delving further in. The winners Twomey is sending out are valuable commodities. Loveisthehigherlaw and Double Martini are two three-year-olds who have made winning debuts for him in the past two weeks, creating immediate sell-on value. The two-year-old Sunday Sovereign was also a big winner of the first juvenile maiden at the Curragh and will surely fetch a pretty penny, with Royal Ascot on the horizon.

While Twomey’s approach may be determined by his overall strategy, where selling horses takes precedence, patience is clearly a large part of what he is about. And that is hugely prevalent in the case of Decrypt, who ran an eyecatching race on debut at the Curragh last year before returning to the track to win on his second run. He was entered for races on Irish Champions Weekend and other end-of-season group races thereafter, but Twomey opted to keep him back.

It was very interesting that when the son of Dark Angel made his seasonal debut this year, he did so in his trainer’s silks. Surely there would have been big offers before and after that win but, as of Monday afternoon, Twomey remains the owner/trainer of Decrypt and that in itself is very interesting.

Although the form of the Cork win doesn’t add up to much, Decrypt could hardly have been more impressive on the day, quickening away from his rivals late on to clock a time that compared favourably to other races on the card.

The current betting market for Saturday’s race suggests that it is not yet 100% certain whether English raider Skardu will make the trip to the Curragh, and the next horse in the betting, Phoenix Of Spain, will be making his seasonal debut. Under those circumstances, it's possible that Decrypt could make his way into second favouritism.

With Foxtrot Liv another lively outsider for Twomey in the 1000 Guineas on Sunday, this could be a breakthrough weekend for the trainer, or at least one where his skills are finally heralded in the mainstream.