Maybe Aidan O'Brien was right and City Of Troy is the best he's had - but we never got to see how good he really was

When you train bucket loads of brilliant racehorses, you are going to get asked a lot of questions. Aidan O'Brien always answers them as well as he can in the moment and while sometimes he might go over the top with the praise of many of his horses, I can't help but think that he was right when he said that City Of Troy was the best he has ever trained.

I know across the breakfast tables of the weights and measures brigade, cornflakes will be being peeled off the walls as I say that but there was something about the way this horse raced that made me think he never ever showed what he could do as a three-year-old and that he could have put up a performance from the ages if all the stars had aligned. 

That's easy to say and much harder to define and you can only be rated on what you have actually done on the track but ratings are a result of the opposition you face as much as anything and I'm certainly not thinking that Bournemouth are the best team in the country just because they beat Man City.