Champion Hurdle: Brian O'Connor hears from Colm Murphy on what it is like to train Brave Inca as he attempts to add to last year's success at the festival.

If Brave Inca can win Tuesday's Champion Hurdle then his young trainer, Colm Murphy, will look back to a crucial turning point five months ago when the horse simply said no.

Maybe it was because the first step on the road to Cheltenham came at Down Royal, on the outskirts of Belfast, that Brave Inca got all dogmatic. But the result was definite. Murphy would do things the way Brave Inca wanted them done. There would be no surrender on that.

"We have been building a whole year up to one day, which is a big risk. But there is little point thinking about anything else because the horse does what he wants to do anyway," says Murphy with the sort of indulgence one reserves for a roguish but gifted child.

"When we went to Down Royal in October we were thinking differently. If he'd won it would have been his eighth win in a row, which would have been an Irish record, and we were definitely going for that. We wanted him straight so we worked him a lot. But the more we did and the more we pushed him the more he resented it.

"He's very clever, a pure character, and we treat him very much as an individual. But he was doing all this hard work every day and he was more or less saying, you can't do this to me. So I had to think again," he adds.

It was Murphy's father, Pat, still riding out every day at 70, who suggested going back to what created such an attitude in the first place. After all, slow and steady worked to spectacular effect last year as Brave Inca roared up the hill to edge out War Of Attrition in the Supreme Novices Hurdle. Four runs this term have resulted in four second placings, but for Murphy and his small team in rural Wexford it has always been just the one race that matters this year.

Brave Inca's spit-in-your-eye attitude could have been made for Cheltenham. Even as he rose through the handicap ranks as a novice he was never one for the spectacular. But that defiance will count for a lot against the other Irish horses that appear to dominate this year's championship.

Back In Front, Hardy Eustace and the others may look the part, but no other horse will examine their depth more than Brave Inca.

Not that Murphy is underestimating any of them. Asked to construct an argument for Brave Inca reversing form with Macs Joy from three races this season, he replies simply: "I don't think I can. I'm afraid of my life of Macs Joy, even though everyone seems to have forgotten him. And Hardy Eustace is the one everyone has to beat. He's done it, he's a spring horse, he'll like the ground and he'll have the headgear back on."

But as befits a man who qualified as an accountant, there is nothing haphazard about his attempt at maintaining a 100 per cent Cheltenham record. And the bonus this year is that the pressure is off the 31-year-old former assistant to Aidan O'Brien.

"It was some relief when it was all over. I put myself under pressure. He was my first runner and he was fancied, and if he was beat I knew there would be people saying if Noel Meade or Willie Mullins had the horse he'd have won. I would have had to live with that. At least there's none of that now," says Murphy, who may not have had a Champion Hurdle runner before but is nevertheless not without experience in preparing champions.

During his time with Aidan O'Brien he was involved in Istabraq's build-up to that spectacular Champion Hurdle victory in 1998.

Like Istabraq, Brave Inca enjoyed a private, pre-festival spin around Leopardstown this week, although comparisons otherwise are meaningless. "I remember riding a good handicapper called Lewisham in a gallop against Istabraq and I was told go as fast as I could. I remember turning into the straight and thinking there is no way Istabraq could be close and next thing he went by as if I was stopped," he says.

Brave Inca is never going to do anything like that.

It just isn't in his nature. But class is not one-dimensional, and after a series of trial defeats it's hard to ignore Murphy's quiet confidence that the cut and thrust of the big race itself will fit like a glove.

"I know it doesn't look like it sometimes, but he does have loads of pace. This season, though, no race has been run to suit him. He likes something to take him there and that means a good pace and a good field. If he has to chase on his own he will, but it's hard work. Company allows him do things easier," Murphy says.

That's an opinion shared by Brave Inca's jockey, Barry Cash, who has a faultless record on the horse but who is yet perceived by some as not being big name enough for a real Champion Hurdle fancy.

"I've been hearing this from every end. It's amazing the number of horses trained in pubs!" Murphy declares.

"Everyone wants Barry Geraghty or Paul Carberry because it's the fashionable thing to use them. That's all. Barry knows the horse better than anyone and that's important.

"What I don't want is Ruby Walsh up on our horse one day, rejecting him the next, and then riding Back In Front when he knows our horse inside out."

It is said with the certainty of a man used to trusting his instincts. Mind you, those same instincts once told him never to get involved in the business of training racehorses.

"I swore I never would. I used to work in the office at O'Brien's in the afternoon and see the financial aspects of training. They don't add up," he says.

Adding a Champion Hurdle to last year's success, however, would be just the sort of sum Murphy will be happy to do. But at Brave Inca's pace of course.