YOU never know what you might bump into on any given day at an Irish race meeting.

A little over a month ago, a notification popped up on my phone detailing a photo memory in my gallery of a horse carrying black and white silks from a summer National Hunt meeting at Gowran Park in 2020.

On paper, this was a low-key fixture but time would prove it was an informative afternoon.

A little-known £600 purchase named Skyace won a two-and-a-half-mile hurdle on her second start since joining Shark Hanlon that day, beating a horse who would go on to be rated just 103. However, Skyace never looked back. The incredible bargain buy was a Grade 1, Grade 3 and listed winner before the season was out, and the rest is history.

An hour later, a handicap hurdle restricted to horses rated 123 or less went the way of none other than a future dual Cheltenham Festival winner Flooring Porter - the horse appearing in my phone picture. The star staying hurdler, who has plundered a trio of Grade 1s since, was winning only his second handicap on that day at Gowran and went on to experience a massive rise in the handicap to a mark of 164.

How unlucky were the respective second-place finishers in those Gowran contests to bump into two Grade 1 winners within an hour of each other, one of which was running off a whole three stone lower than their subsequent mark? It all goes to show that gems can still be hidden in slightly obscure places, and - more broadly - demonstrates the potential standard of horse involved at even low-grade meetings in Ireland.

Though not quite as dramatic, a similar thought crossed my mind when watching Absurde plunder the £500,000 Sky Bet Ebor Handicap at York for Willie Mullins last weekend.

What chance had the runners in a two-and-a-half-mile novice hurdle at Killarney in May who had to butt heads with him in that relatively low-key contest?

Aussie aces

As it turns out, last weekend’s half-length success over warm favourite Sweet William might just have set up Willie Mullins’ best ever chance to win the Melbourne Cup. In Absurde and dazzling Royal Ascot scorer Vauban, he has two serious bullets to fire at Australia’s greatest race.

Even though ante-post price cuts are most usually rolled out for those who have won races in the lead-up to the target in question, there was actually a horse who sat at home last weekend who saw his Flemington odds impacted as a result of what happened at York.

Absurde was trimmed to 20/1 (from 40/1) for Melbourne glory after his lucrative Ebor strike, but Vauban - the stablemate who hammered him by seven and a half lengths when they finished one-two in the Copper Horse Handicap at Royal Ascot - also hardened at the head of the market following the York result. Susannah Ricci’s dual-purpose performer went from a top-priced 7/1 to now be 3/1 with several firms for the Melbourne Cup, and no bigger than 5/1.

Near misses

Winning the Flemington feature is clearly an itch that Mullins would love to scratch. Since his first crack at the race 20 years ago with dual Grade 1-winning hurdler Holy Orders (when down the field behind none other than Makybe Diva), the Closutton maestro’s efforts have grown stronger and stronger when it comes to this race.

Simenon, partnered by Richard Hughes, ran a big race at 18/1 to finish fourth in 2013, while Max Dynamite’s two visits in 2015 and 2017 resulted in a second and a third. Mullins’ other two representatives in the latter running showed up well too, in sixth (Thomas Hobson) and eighth (Wicklow Brave).

Of those five Mullins visitors to Melbourne listed above, only one - Wicklow Brave, who once posted a Timeform rating of 161 over hurdles - is on a par with what Vauban has achieved over flights. A peak Timeform figure of 160+ represents Vauban’s career-best in that discipline. He has a major engine.

Solid credentials

Given the 2023 ante-post favourite wasn’t always an entirely efficient type over hurdles and appears to have taken his form up a notch for switching back to the flat, he clearly has plenty going for him.

It’s worth noting also that the chance for Mullins to rock up to Melbourne with two live chances, provided they pass the relevant veterinary checks, is testament to his top-notch recruitment.

His Ebor winner was bought for €260,000 at Arqana last July and won back £300,000 in one appearance last weekend, while the yard’s other big Australian hope was sourced privately off the flat in France.

Through Vauban, and now with Absurde in tow, Ireland’s 17-time champion National Hunt trainer may finally be able to tick one of the world’s most famous races off his bucket list.

All the while, a landmark victory would pay another handsome compliment to the standard of what can appear on an Irish racecourse at any possible moment.

AS we arrive into the closing months of the flat season, the presence of a handicap horse who isn’t overly exposed so far in the campaign can be attractive to punters.

That said, it can often be best to tread carefully when it comes to horses making their first start back in the autumn following a mid-season break, the theory being that they could have met with a setback in the intervening period and potentially may have had a slightly rushed preparation to get back in time for the end of the season.

Looking at all handicap runners in September or October in Ireland from 2010 to 2022, horses making their first start after a break of between 12 and 23 weeks win just 4.1% of the time.

The strike rate of handicappers in the same period who had last run within the previous 12 weeks is close to double that - 7.6%. Handicappers running in the autumn after such a period off also win much less often than the market expects. Of the 1,348 runners to fit this profile since 2010, their respective SPs would have suggested there should be 66 winners, but there were in fact only 56. In general, handicap runners back from a break of 12 weeks or more in September and October win a lowly 3.8% of the time.

Even those returning from a potentially shorter break period of seven or more weeks in the autumn operate at just 4.7%. For context, that is a fair deal lower than the win rate of horses running within three or four weeks of their last run, which tallies at 8%.

It can be worth treating those returning from breaks with a little caution as we enter the final stretch of the 2023 flat season.