THE line of questioning for newspaper interviews tends to follow similar trends. Start with a bit of chit chat, a gentle intro, ‘things are going well’ and all that jive. Keep the more testing stuff until the subject is warmed up, more comfortable talking to you, thinking you’re a grand lad.

What about the Twitterati saying you’re making horses fall at 35mph to make a few quid?

What about that positive drugs test?

What about that time the horses were sick and people said they had the plague?

What about the rumours that you’d lost your job?

Sometimes though, you just dive in with the meaty stuff, straight off the bat.

Did I read somewhere recently that you’d just turned 50?

“Jesus yeah,” comes the response from a chuckling Paul Nolan. “That’s some way to start off. Great. I’m really excited about that one Daragh!”

“There were a few older friends of mine, I remember celebrating their 50th with them and I was saying ‘by jaysus lads, I can’t stand the thoughts of being 50’ and I’m there now. I was talking to Noel Meade the other day and he said since he was 50, he only has his annual 50th every year!”

The tousled locks remain, if not quite of the volume that earned him the nickname Moses at Jim Bolger’s yard and forced him to wear a cap in the company of the boss, who frowned on hirsuteness.

The ready smile has survived 23 years in the grinder. For a long time, there was plenty to smile about. The rise had been quick and his place in the mixer for the prime pots fairly constant. Then came the recession. He was burned by some unscrupulous owners, but made mistakes too trying to locate a spark.

AFLOAT

Trading kept them afloat but it got to a point where he and his brother James, a key cog in the Toberona Stables operation, had a kitchen table discussion about the future.

Ultimately, once Nolan felt happy his teenage son Barry would be interested and, more importantly, mentally strong enough to deal with the vast pressures associated with being a trainer, he was determined to have something worthwhile to pass on.

The lessons learned were applied and green shoots are showing again after the career low of just five winners and €97,088 from the 2016-2017 campaign.

He is currently on 13 winners, which matches last season’s total and would love to hit 20 by the end of Punchestown.

It is a long way from the halcyon days of two Cheltenham successes, three Galway Hurdle winners in six seasons, a Hennessy Gold Cup, eight Grade 1s: Noble Prince, Joncol, Dabiroun, Accordion Etoile, Defy Logic, Cloone River, Cuan Na Grai. But the graph is moving the right direction again and he is very clear on why that is the case.

“We’ve the same bunch of men that were always with us and thankfully they stayed with us, because when you’re not flying them in, it’s not easy to encourage lads to put a horse with you, because the rest of the lads are flying it and that’s just the way the thing goes now. Everyone wants to go to a place that’s flying so we’re thankful to be able to stay going.

“I started with two, it was four the following year and it snowballed then when we got a couple of winners. It went from four to 54 to 100… It went up very quick but it can also go down very quick. But that’s the way it is and it’s the way it was for a lot of lads. When things start going right for ya, an awful lot of fellas move to you fairly quick. They’d moving out of other yards. They’ll always go to the next lad if you have you a few winners at all.

“Numberswise, you’d still love to have a few more but we have to be thankful for what we have and try and manage them as well as we can.

“We’ve a nice few young horses. It takes time to make them, to bring them into the system. We found the last couple of years we probably rushed those youngsters a little bit too much and that certainly doesn’t work. We have to be patient with them.”

Having nothing to go to war with caused that undue hastiness.

“You’re always saying to yourself, ‘if things don’t happen soon we’re going to be in trouble’ and while there’s no point in panicking, it’s easy say that. But there’s no doubt, especially when you’re buying them a bit bigger, they seem to take a little time and it certainly it didn’t work rushing them.

“The way we try do it now is take the complications out of everything. In the last couple of years we probably over-complicated things. You can do that and get into a bit of a rut. I feel now you’re better not to over-complicate things and I think that leads to a little bit of an easier life as well.”

He is likely to reconsider the type of individual he acquires this year, with a view to them needing less time to develop, and also not competing with the leading point-to-point producers and major owners like Gigginstown House Stud.

“When you’re trying to buy these bigger type of horses, it’s your own fault but you’re trying to buy something to give the lads and yourself the best chance. But you want to be going into it knowing it’s gonna take time and everyone wants to be on the same pitch as you knowing that. If you’re buying a rangy three-year-old, you’re talking at least two years down the road.

“That’s the way the market is gone but I suppose now, looking at it from my point of view, the value might be the 16hh horse that the point-to-point lads don’t want, who looks like he’s going to be a hurdler more than a chaser. That’s the one I’d be looking at from now on.

“If I could reverse what I spent the last couple of years, I would have been sticking with those sort of horses with what we had to pay for the bigger type of horse which you’re talking that little bit further down the line to make them.

“We always have a bunch of youngster on the premises. We either find an owner for them or they go to the sales, Land Rover or Derby, or if they’re not Land Rover, Derby class, they’ll go to the August sales. But we have to try keep things realistic and put bread on the table as well. If I haven’t got an owner for them, they have to go to the sales.”

SELLING

One imagines selling horses played a crucial role in maintaining the equilibrium of the business.

“It absolutely did. You have to be sensible about it. You have to forget about the ego and say, ‘listen, hold on now. There’s no point in us going round shaking a Trócaire box outside mass!’, you know what I mean?”

The nadir of two seasons ago did not come from left field.

“We kept plugging on to train but we knew a couple of years ago we were going to be under pressure with what we had to come out with. We’d just no firepower. There are times you might say you’ll stay going during the summer but we had nothing to stay going with. We’d no summer handicappers. We’d no… we just had to be realistic to say ‘this is going to happen.’

“It wasn’t a surprise when we went down to the small amount of winners that we did. It was just trying to extend the snorkel to keep the air coming in when you’re under water. Thankfully we’re making a living out of it and I’m still happy enough doing it. It just makes it easier to get out of bed if you can get a winner now and then.”

Trust is crucial in any success story. A trainer needs it with his owners, his jockeys and his team at the yard.

James (the youngest of four at 40, with Máiréad and Imelda between the two boys) has become an integral part of the operation since joining the fold after spells with John O’Shea and Venetia Williams, after big brother had turned the family farm into an established training centre.

“I’m on the ground, working in the yard and I go up to the top of the gallops and see that things are moving right but basically James is doing the board in the morning with the team of lads around him. I’m on the ground looking at it, James is controlling the riding out and an awful lot of the training side.”

TEMPERAMENT

Nolan’s daughter Sarah (21) is a nurse in London. Barry is 19, and as much a reason as anything for the fact that his father still has a licence.

“He’s in Maynooth doing the equine business course. He was sent up to learn how to get the money in!” says Nolan with a loud guffaw before turning very serious indeed.

“If I didn’t think my son was interested in it and if I didn’t think he’d have the temperament to do it, I wouldn’t like to see him go do it, because I wouldn’t like to see him in a mental home when he’s 35.

“I think he is the sort of a chap that has the mentality for it so that’s why I’ll continue to try and burst my own ass, to give him a shout at it. And that’d be one of the main reasons to keep battling on.”

Here’s to the 60th.

ADVICE TO NEW TRAINERS

“If I was giving advice to anyone now, I’d be saying to make sure, if there’s a man starts letting you down for longer than two or three months, you have to pull the plug sooner rather than later or the plug will be pulled on you.

“The margins are very tight. So if you get a guy, or a couple of guys that don’t pay their bills, it has an awful effect on the whole thing because it’s taking your profit away. Your good guys are paying their way and they’re supplementing the guys that aren’t paying their way. That puts the whole thing under pressure.

“Sometimes people forget that you have to pay staff, farriers, vets, feed and all the rest of it for very little credit. So it’s very detrimental to the business to let bills run up as normally, when that happens, you’re not going to get paid. I am very lucky now with the owners I have who stayed with me through the tough times and who I can trust. Hopefully they will be rewarded for that in the next couple of years.

“So it’s very important to find people you can trust to work with. After that, it’s vital that a trainer remains positive through those bad times. It can be hard but this is a great business and can be very rewarding.”

DISCORAMA

“He came out of the Drinmore grand. He was a little bit tight in himself, a tad stiff after it so we just gave him a little bit of time off. If you’d a load of ‘em you’d probably have kept him going but because we haven’t too many like him, and with the forecast saying it didn’t seem like the ground was going to get softer – and it didn’t either – we took our time. Groundwise, we didn’t miss anything. If the ground is safer, we’ll go to Naas at the end of the month (for the Grade 3 three-mile novice chase) and hopefully he’ll be a contender in that.”

MERI DEVIE

“She’ll be stepped up in class in the mares’ chase at Thurles (tomorrow) and that’ll be a different kettle of fish. They’ll be going five mile an hour faster and you’ll know then how she’ll take to fences. They went a steadyish enough pace in Naas the other day. She was able to warm into it lovely but it’s always a different kettle of fish when you step up a grade.”

THE GROUND

“It’s unbelievable. And there’s no point in saying anything else. I know everyone is happy when they’re getting winners but it does put far more pressure on Gordon, Willie, Jessica, Henry and everyone – it does put pressure on you when you know you’re galloping on ground a little bit faster than you’d like. You are doing that little bit more worrying when you go to feel their legs the next day.”

THE NUMBERS GAME

“The point-to-point lads that are so successful now, that’s why they’re so successful. They had the bottle to go. They knew from the start it was a numbers game. They could buy a couple of expensive ones and a couple of ones then they’d buy for 10 or 12 grand could turn out to be the one that would bail them out that year.

“Of course you have to do the thing right as well and the lads are very good at what they do. You have to be producing results or it doesn’t matter what amount of numbers you have but it’s definitely a numbers game as regards training.”