O’Brien keen to exorcise City Of Troy Guineas ghost

Aidan O’Brien is leaving no stone unturned as he prepares the lightly-raced pair of Twain and Expanded for the Betfred 2000 Guineas at Newmarket.

The Ballydoyle handler has saddled 10 previous winners of the first colts’ Classic of the season, but was last year left blaming himself after his superstar City Of Troy failed to fire on the Rowley Mile.

O’Brien admits preparing raw three-year-olds for such a major race so early in the season is something of a balancing act, but he is keen not to make the same mistake twice.

Speaking at a press morning arranged by the Jockey Club at his yard on Monday, the trainer said: “I’ve looked under every stone, but hopefully I didn’t look under too many!

“We hope we haven’t over-trained them, which is always a possibility. We’ve done everything we should have done up until now, but hopefully we haven’t been too hard on them.

“I made a hash of him (City Of Troy) in the Guineas – the one thing I didn’t do caught him and it just went wrong.

“There’s a few horses there that could be absolutely anything and at this time of year the water is very rocky because you’re trying to have a little look at them without them knowing it and over-exposing them.

“That’s the problem, whether you lean too hard on them or don’t lean enough, especially as the Guineas comes early. It’s easy to overdo them as well as underdo them, but we think they’re fairly right.”

With long-time 2000 Guineas favourite The Lion In Winter instead being readied for the Dante Stakes at York, O’Brien’s two representatives at Newmarket are set to be Twain and Expanded, both of whom made winning debuts in October before swiftly being thrown in at the deep end in Group One company.

Twain supplemented his successful introduction at Leopardstown with a top-level win in the Criterium International at Saint-Cloud eight days later, while Expanded struck gold first time out at the Curragh before finishing a close second to Shadow Of Light in the Dewhurst the following week.

“It was probably impossible what we asked Twain to do. He never saw a horse in his maiden, the plan was to drop him in and educate him a little bit but he jumped out and that was it and won by six lengths, so he went to France after having a racecourse gallop by himself really and he was very green but still won very nicely,” said O’Brien.

“Expanded was going to the Dewhurst for experience and then when The Lion In Winter came out, that put him as the number one, probably unfairly, and then when there wasn’t many runners in the race, Ryan (Moore) ended up having to make his own running and he got into a duel with the third horse three furlongs down, so it was very hard on him what happened.”

While O’Brien is currently planning a two-pronged 2000 Guineas assault, he did raise the possibility of Expanded taking an alternative route.

He added: “Obviously, Twain is a Group One winner and what we thought is if the two are going very well coming up to it, we might let Expanded go to the Curragh the following Monday because he’s not a Group One winner and he could start in the Irish Guineas trial (Tetrarch Stakes) and Twain could go straight into the Guineas.”

The trainer confirmed that Camille Pissarro and Henri Matisse would sidestep Newmarket in favour of a tilt at the French equivalent, the Poule d’Essai des Poulains, the following weekend.