Willie Mullins on the verge of British Trainers’ Championship after Macdermott seals lucrative Ayr raid by winning the Scottish Grand National

The margin was tiny but the implication was huge. Willie Mullins had launched an Ayr raid, aiming to make history, and the pixels in the photograph at the end of a thrilling Coral Scottish National confirmed he had hit the target.

Mullins had only sent five runs to this vibrant track on Scotland’s West Coast in 36 years, never having trained a winner but how he changed that on a seismic afternoon. Macdermott provided him with a first success in the feature race but there were another three for good measure.

Usually, you would anticipate the odds being short but not this time.

Sharjah, an old favourite in Mullins’s yard, started the ball rolling with a 7/1 success in race two; Macdermott, incredibly, returned at 18/1 in the National before Chosen Witness obliged at 12/1 and Quai De Bourbon lived up to his billing of the afternoon’s good thing at 8/11.

Even by his own standards, this was staggering. What Mullins has done this winter has been like a tennis players scooping all four Grand Slam events or a Premier League team completing the treble, a man so in the groove that his opponents have no answers to his questions.

Now he stands on the verge of a remarkable achievement. No Irish trainer has won the British jumps title since Vincent O’Brien in 1954 but Mullins looks ready to change that statistic after collecting £204,543 across the eight races. It made the ambitious trip worthwhile.

‘We had a plan in the back of our mind if we won the National, we would come here,’ said Mullins, who had conquered Aintree with I Am Maximus seven days ago. ‘But I didn’t envisage such a big team. It’s giving everything a sparkle to the end of the season, you need it to create atmosphere.

‘What I did say to David Casey, who does all the race planning was: Everything that qualifies for anything, put them in. All the owners were behind us. They said bring the horses over, run them wherever you can and try and get this job done. I think we’re three quarters of the way there now.’

They certainly are. At the end of the National, which Macdermott managed to pilfer away from the gallant runner-up Surrey Quest, Dan Skelton and Paul Nicholls, Mullins’s nearest pursuers, walked back to the paddock with an air of resignation.

Skelton, buoyed by a three winners on Friday’s card, had started the day with a small advantage over Mullins but, come early evening, he was empty and deflated. He was now staring at a £200,000 chasm and, in reality, looking for a towel to throw.

‘It’s not completely over but he’s got us on the ropes,’ said Skelton. ‘In sport, all you can do is your best and sometimes you have to accept your best isn’t enough. It’s pretty gutting. Willie has quality but it’s also the depth that makes him impossible to beat.

Macdermott won the Scottish Grand National after a thrilling photo finish at Ayr on Saturday

‘All the stars have aligned for him: he’s won the Champion Hurdle, the Gold Cup and the Grand National and now this. He’s had an unbelievable year.’

A measure of how well things are going for Mullins is that he actually missed the start of the National and didn’t see favourite Mr Incredible refuse to race and We’llhavewan fall at the first but he saw the action that mattered when his nephew, Danny, drove Macdermott home.

For good measure, Klarc Kent and Ontheropes – two other members of the Closutton raiding party – filled fourth and fifth place, all adding to the coffers. There is no sense, however, that they believe things are in the bag, particularly with £650,000 up for grabs at Sandown next week.

‘For us to win the title was something unrealistic,’ said Danny Mullins. ‘The horses keep turning up, so we just keep going and who knows, we could be a bit closer again by next week. We’ll keep working: it’s not done yet.’