Cheltenham Festival preview: Plenty of Irish interest to keep an eye on

As usual with Cheltenham, there is plenty of Irish interest this year as the biggest event on the race card kicks off on Tuesday.

Ballyburn will lead a four-strong Willie Mullins team into battle in the Brown Advisory Novices’ Chase at Cheltenham.

The Closutton handler has saddled a record six previous winners of the extended three-mile contest, with Florida Pearl (1998), Rule Supreme (2004), Cooldine (2009), Don Poli (2015), Monkfish (2021) and last year’s victor Fact To File all featuring.

A brilliant winner of the Turners Novices’ Hurdle at last year’s Festival, Ballyburn appears the stable’s first string this time around following two wins from his first three starts over fences.

The seven-year-old was no match for Sir Gino over two miles in the Wayward Lad Novices’ Chase at Kempton in December, but was a decisive winner over two miles and five furlongs at the Dublin Racing Festival and Mullins does not view a further hike in distance as an issue.

“If I hadn’t got Impaire Et Passe we’d have gone to Limerick over two and a half with him over Christmas, so we went across the water and normally he might have won the race in Kempton, but I think we just came up against a fantastic horse in Sir Gino,” he said.

“I think Ballyburn learnt a lot and his pedigree has lots of stamina in it. I think he’s a potential Gold Cup horse in the making.

“I was very pleased with how he came out of his race in Leopardstown. He would need to settle a little bit as he was fairly keen that day, but that experience will be good.

“At Kempton he had to gun him down to every fence and when you are doing that it gets into the horse’s head. It was a two-five race the last day, he was trying to replicate the pace from Kempton and Paul (Townend) was