The thrilling, fleeting moments of watching a horse win can be enough to sustain a breeder throughout tougher or more mundane times. And so it was when TDN got on the blower to Mark Dreeling that we found him mucking out while still able to exude excitement in the yarn of how he and his wife Barbara Fonzo came to breed Saturday's G3 Greenham Stakes winner Alparslan.“I'm well back down to earth,” he says, pitchfork in one hand, phone presumably wedged between ear and shoulder on the other side. “I do it all – muck out, foal them, cover them, break them, ride them, everything.”The latter part of the sentence is backed up by the fact that, as we speak, Dreeling switches from mucking out to tacking up Alparslan's half-brother to go on the walker. The Minzaal colt has a date at the Tattersalls Ireland Breeze-up Sale on May 22. By then, Alparslan could either have run in the 2,000 Guineas at Newmarket or be on the cusp of lining up for the Irish equivalent at the Curragh. Either way, Dreeling insists he will be there, and it won't be the first time that he and Fonzo have cheered home a Classic runner bred at their Coole House Farm, as the dual group winner Larchmont Lad (Footstepsinthesand) has already given them that pleasure when running in the 2,000 Guineas won by Churchill. Like Larchmont Lad, Alparslan was a graduate of the Tattersalls Ireland September Yearling Sale and it was Federico Barnerini who selected the son of Dandy Man on behalf of owner Mohammed Al Shehhi from the Coole House draft for €75,000.“Federico, the minute he saw him, he fell in love with him, and Joe Foley said to me on the day, 'That's the best looking Dandy Man I've ever seen',” Dreeling recalls. “I think his temperament is what's helped him so immensely. I used to call him the cart horse as a weanling. All winter long, when I'd be walking down the fields to feed him, he was with two other colts and they would come galloping down the field to get their feed and he would just saunter down behind them like a cart horse, never stress himself. And then, of course, he bullied them all the way from the feed when he would get down. And the brother is exactly the same. So obviously the mare puts that into them.”The mare in question is Laciredeski (Toronado), who has hit the jackpot with her first foal. “We used Dandy Man as he was nailed on to get the mare started, to get a two-year-old winner,” Dreeling says. “As breeders, you can't be looking at the short term. You always have to look at the long term and getting them to the right trainers is always the most important thing for us. We don't have the best of pedigrees so we're always hoping that we get a good individual, and Alparslan is a beautiful horse, even if I say so myself. And he was from the minute he stepped out – those good ones, they just do everything right from the minute they're born.”Dreeling stresses that it is his wife who must take all the credit for the fact that they ended up breeding Alparslan, as it was Fonzo who insisted on tracking down Laciredeski after they had sold her as a yearling for a longstanding client.“We've had that family here with us for generations,” Dreeling explains. “The breeder of the granddam Sciolina was a man called Filippo Serafini from Italy, and the mare's lived with us here the whole year round for years.” Alparslan returns to the winner's enclosure at Newbury | Emma Berry The mare's first foal and one of only two fillies was Laciredeski, who initially went to Richard Hughes but was then sold on as an unraced two-year-old for £600 at the Ascot mixed sale of 2019.“Erosandpsyche was the second foal, and we couldn't get him into any kind of sale because he was by Sepoy,” Dreeling says. “My wife loved him from the time he was a foal and wanted to buy him, so we did. And on the strength of what he showed us when we started getting him ready for a breeze-up sale, we decided to buy Sciolina from Filippo, who was getting older. The mare was a double Listed race winner in Italy and she came back here for breeding as soon as she was finished. And then Eros went on to be a very good horse.”A progressive sprinter, Erosandpsyche has won four times and ran second in the G1 Flying Five Stakes to Highfield Princess but sustained an injury in that race which enforced a long lay-off. Dreeling adds, “It took two and a half years but we got him back and he's been consistent, but never to the same extent because it was a hind leg injury.”Though a breeze-up prep is not Plan A for the Coole House horses, it is nevertheless a process which comes naturally to Dreeling, who for many years has run a breaking and pre-training business in tandem with a commercial breeding operation. “I used to do a huge amount of breaking and pre-training for Charles O'Brien from Baronrath Stud and for his dad, the great Vincent. The last 23 years of Vincent's life, I broke all his horses. We have the facilities and the jockeys, so it was easy for me if I had one that missed a yearling sale to go and breeze it,” he says. “We've only breezed 10 in 10 years and all of them have turned out to be good horses and have gone on and won multiple races across Europe. We just take our time with them. It's important for us – we're not interested in doing these blistering fast times because we're breeders, we have to protect the horses. We want horses to win races for our mares, so we just bring them along slowly and we always go to the Fairyhouse sale.“I don't like galloping two-year-olds too soon. As the great man Vincent O'Brien said, don't start working them until three months after they've turned two. That man was a genius.”And so it is to Fairyhouse that Alparslan's brother will go next month after a setback ruled him out of last year's yearling sale. That cloud is now firmly lined in silver as whichever Classic engagement Alparslan takes up, he has already provided the Minzaal colt with a bold black-type update, enhancing his two wins last year in a Leicester novice contest and the Tattersalls Ireland Super Auction Sales Stakes. “He's a big boy so we'll go to the last breeze-up to give him every chance,” says Dreeling, who is grateful to the Tattersalls Ireland team for putting him in touch with Donny Postema, the Dutch owner/trainer who had bought Laciredeski for a meagre sum and ended up winning five races with her in Holland and Germany.Sciolina, who is now retired at Coole House after undergoing colic surgery, is also responsible for the treble Italian Listed winner Some Respect (Gleneagles) and the 94-rated dual winner Vestigia (Footstepsinthesand). Her daughter has picked up the baton for the family in some style.“It was my wife who said to me to go track her down,” says Dreeling. “And the people in Tattersalls were wonderful, they helped me track down Donny. But none of it would have happened or been possible without Barbara. It was she who was instrumental in all of it, from Erosandpsyche, to buying Sciolina, and then buying Laci.“She is a vet and accountant and nothing exists here but for Barbara. She's the absolute backbone of the place along with our daughters Megan and Julia. They're the important people. You're talking to me, but I'm just the yard man.”Based in Monasterevin, Co Kildare, Dreeling and Fonzo bought their farm 30 years ago, but Dreeling had already spent several decades in racing by then.“I started working with racehorses when I was 11 years of age. I left school, left home and started living in a caravan in the back of a racing yard, and I've been working seven days a week since then. I'm 60 now, so it's been quite a while, but it's a wonderful life,” he says. Laciredeski is one of six mares owned by the couple, and Dreeling notes that she is now more than a week overdue in producing her latest foal by Dark Angel. The nine-year-old mare didn't get in foal the year before when sent to Gleneagles and is booked to visit Ghaiyyath at the nearby Kildangan Stud later this season.“We foal 60 mares a season – our own mares and some for clients that have been with us for a long time,” says Dreeling, who grew up in. Kilkenny and admits that his first love was the jumps.“From the time I was a child, I was obsessed with National Hunt Racing. I worked in the UK for John Upson for a few years in the 1980s. When we started a business, we went to the Flat because it was a quicker turnover. I love Flat racing now but my heart would be in the National Hunt game,” he says. The Flat is not so bad though when you have a top-class colt to follow, and Dreeling is hopeful that Karl Burke will send Alparslan back to the Curragh, where he won last year. “We went to watch him in the Dewhurst and Karl said in an interview that he was a bit sore after Newmarket. But he was so good up the Curragh and usually by the end of May, we can still have some ease in the ground,” he says. “It's a dream. That's why we all get up and work 20 hours a day for seven months of the year, because that's always the dream. “I just hope that he fulfils the promise that he's showing. There's a lot of very good three-year-olds out there and one race doesn't make the year, but the Guineas is the Guineas. It's wonderful to have won the Greenham, and to have any black type for your mare is wonderful, but we'll dream on for another few weeks.” The post ‘We’ll Dream On’: Coole House Farm Relishing Success of Classic Hope Alparslan appeared first on TDN | Thoroughbred Daily News | Horse Racing News, Results and Video | Thoroughbred Breeding and Auctions.