IT was a messy race, with five inexperienced two-year-olds either floundering in the soft ground or getting in each other’s way, but Joseph O’Brien will care not one jot about that after Green Sense rewarded his canny race -planning with a famous victory in the Group 2 Goffs Prix Robert Papin at Chantilly last Sunday.

While most other Irish trainers were concentrating on the Curragh, or more specifically the impossible task of denying his all-powerful father, Aidan, in the Irish Oaks or the Railway Stakes, Joseph sneaked Green Sense overseas in the search of some cut in the ground.