Eoin Griffin

I'm from the village of Slieverue in south Kilkenny and we're only a few miles from Waterford city.

We'll be glad to see the back of this cold snap but, because we're near the estuary, the frost isn't as bad here as in some parts so we're lucky in that respect. Our gallop faces south-east and the days have been fine, so once the sun gets high enough it thaws out the gallop and we're able to get the horses on it by 10am rather than the usual 8am.

I suppose you could say my training career has been a game of two halves. Everything went well initially and I had plenty of Graded winners and was on an upward curve for a good few years but it hasn't been easy in recent times. The horses have been performing well this season and all you can do is make the most of what you have.

As a young lad my interest in racing would have come from my father and my aunt. I would go racing with them and there was many a note handed in at school to say I had a doctor's or dentist's appointment before we headed off to wherever the meeting was! It wouldn't have been just the local tracks either, we covered a fair bit of the country.

My aunt had a shop in the village and another aunt had a bicycle shop in Waterford. When I was sent in to work in the bicycle shop, the phone would ring from Aunt Betty back in the village and I had a well worn path to Paddy Power's on O'Connell Street to back her fancies for the day. She loved racing and enjoyed a bet.

My father is still going strong in his mid-eighties and he's the first man in the yard at 7am every morning and mucks out his five or six. He looks after some of the younger horses then and it's brilliant to have him so involved in the business. My wife Martina looks after the office and my son, who has a job locally, helps out in the yard in the evenings and at weekends. My daughter lives and works in Dublin.

I couldn't speak highly enough of my staff including Natalie, two lads David and Niall and a local girl Aine who's studying in RACE at the moment. I'm hoping she'll come back to us when she completes her course there.

Before I went down the training route, I worked as a maintenance fitter for Guinness at their brewery in Waterford which is now a distillery.

Being involved in breeding a few horses was my route into training and I began training a few of the homebreds. Rua Lass and Orthez were full-sisters and both did well on the track and went on to breed some useful performers. We only lost Rua Lass last year at the age of thirty and we had her at home all her life.

I'm over twenty years with a licence and, although I prefer to look forward rather than back, it's fair to say we've had some really good horses. Lounaos was a precocious and hardy three-year-old who won the November Handicap and the big juvenile hurdle at the Leopardstown Christmas meeting. Being such a strong, robust filly and getting all the allowances, I let her take her chance in the Irish Champion Hurdle at Leopardstown as a four-year-old and she was a very creditable fourth when you look back at what she was up against. The first three were Hardy Eustace, Brave Inca and Macs Joy. When I think back on it, I feel that maybe it wasn't the right thing to do by her but you can only call it as you see it at the time.

Around that time Kazal was a smashing novice hurdler for us, not the quickest but a real battler who wore his heart on his sleeve. Matt Chapman had a real soft spot for him and Matt was a good supporter of me on At The Races at that time. After winning the Boyne Hurdle, Kazal went for the Stayers' Hurdle at Cheltenham. I was down at the last and when he turned for home in front, I said to someone near me "they won't get past him now" because he hated being passed when in the lead. Unfortunately, no sooner had I said it when both Inglis Drever and Kasbah Bliss swept by him in about five strides and my lad came home an honourable third in the end.

We've had some smart Flat horses too who have won good races including premier handicaps. Finicius is one that comes to mind because his first piece of work at home is burned into my mind! I asked Johnny Murtagh where I should go with him after he rode him in a gallop around Leopardstown one summer evening, and he said "you can go wherever you effing like, but wherever it is, I'll be riding him!" He duly won first time out in a 20-runner two-year-old maiden on Derby weekend and went on to have a good career with six wins, but breathing problems meant he couldn't quite fulfil his potential. He had a fair engine, but the petrol wasn't going in.

In 2008, I was able to put the finishing touches to my yard on Beacon Hill. It was a green field site after I bought some land a couple of miles from my home village of Slieverue. I invested heavily in it and we have great facilities, but of course the autumn of 2008 saw the financial crash and a lot of my owners were affected by that. The timing of that was just one of those unforeseeable things that were out of my control, and a few years later a major construction project that came quite close to the yard was no help to us either.

But I'm still here and having invested so much in the yard, it was never something that I was going to walk away from. Trying to find a good horse is what gets all racing people out of bed and the game is a bit like a drug in that respect. I enjoy what I do and it's nice going out in the mornings and bringing on young horses in the yard.

I don't begrudge any of the big yards their success because they've all built up their businesses over the years and I don't agree with putting any sort of a cap on the number of horses one trainer can have. I can't see how that would work. It's true that things have become very centralised and a lot of owners who might have supported smaller yards ten or fifteen years ago now gravitate to the big stables, but things can change quickly in this game and it's up to the smaller trainers to raise their game.

We've done well for JP McManus and he's to be commended for leaving horses with the trainers he initially sends them to. It's a morale boost for my staff that we are training for a major owner like him, that he has the trust in us to do the job right. One Last Tango is a horse I have for JP and he's won his last two. We'll have him out again soon but he wants it heavy.

Mark McDonagh is another owner who has been a loyal supporter for many years and I'm hoping that his horse Jody Ted can keep going the right way over fences after winning at Clonmel. He's another horse that wants it testing and I'm hoping to run him in a rated novice chase at Limerick over Christmas where conditions should suit.

So we have a few horses at the moment that I think can climb the ranks a bit further but, as sure as night follows day, the handicapper will catch up with them and the task is to source new horses and owners. That is the challenge but I've never lost belief in my ability to get the job done and I actually think I'm a better trainer nowadays compared to when I started out. We're come through some tough times, we're still here and the dream of finding a good one is still alive. If we do, we can get the best out of it, I have no doubt in my mind about that.