THE upcoming Cheltenham Festival is one of the most challenging for punters in years, and part of the confusion comes from the Willie Mullins novice hurdlers. Figuring out that puzzle will be important for the four days, though I wonder if the yard themselves are in as much a muddle as anyone else.

We typically arrive at Cheltenham with a broadly defined pecking order among this group and the horses towards the top of the tree run their races and often win; we must go back to 2012 to find a year Mullins failed to win one of the three Grade 1 novice events and there were five Dawn Run successes in that period too.