Should British Racing Be Worried?

As a boy 1075/6 it was 20% in Ireland.
Reduced to 10 % in the 1980s and the to 5 to 2 to bookie.
I believe when betting tax was introduced in UK in 1960s the Chancellor responsible had a hefty tab with William Hill so made the decision to pass the tax onto the punter .
Hard to argue with a Black and Tan, even a good one.
 
You know the way some memories burn into your brain?

Early August, Saturday, 1980, I was in studying for an unpcoming repeated exam (Trinity), walked up to an independent bookmaker on a small lane that linked Dame Street to where the Mercantile Pub sits. Had £1 on Viele (Hobbs/Baxter) to win the Nassau Stakes at 2/1, distinctly recall paying the 20P vigorish. Collected, picked up a couple of custard slices in Bewleys, Westmoreland St, on the way back in to the library, lay out on College Green to watch the cricket as I ate them. I was studying the Canterbury Tales that day. I think the bookie was Alan Tuthill, but not sure on that one. I was rocking a Mark Bolan/Leo Sayer fusion hairdo in those days, combat jacket, CND badge, cheese cloth shirt, Wrangler flares, desert boots. As PJ indicates there was surely handsomeness afoot, although obviously, I couldn't possibly comment.
 
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an capall said:
You should stick to rating horses. Clearly not great at the human beings.
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My eyesight wouldn't be good enough to distinguish any human's facial features from a distance.

Everybody just looked the same back then. I had the cheesecloth shirt, Wrangler flares and deebees. Substitute the combat gear, CND badge and big hair for Peter Fonda gold-rimmed glasses and there's me.
 
Henry de Bromhead has now won more British prizemoney this season than Nicky Henderson £1,514,072 against £1,387,461.

8 wins & 6 places compared to 96 wins & 109 places.
 
British trainers ,with the odd exception have just become too cautious.

£100K Paddy bonus if a British horse wins the Punchestown Gold Cup.

For all it’s a publicity thing; I could have offered that because it’s surely 1/20 no British runner and no offers that they’d fail to win if they did.
 
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I think it’s any Grade 1 not just the GC. But the point is the same. A safe offer with little risk of a payout


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Not so very long ago winning the Grand National alone determined the champion NH sire.
Escart, Quorum and others were champion sire with one winner.
With the drop all around of prizemoney with covid the marquee races have greater clout and Henry has more or less won them all.
 
Is the standard of NH racing just poor atm? Some of the novice hurdlers this year, are appalling. Marsh form won’t stand the test of time.

British racing itself is in the duldrums.
 
Irish are dominating the NH racing

For many reasons

The programm in England is bad, too many races, too many bad races, prize money very low and Brexit will impact even more on it

Irish have a bunch of trainers more skilled and more ambitious.

Best horses are going there and jockeys are in other planet, when you see riding Rachel, Townnend , Kennedy ...etc against Skelton and Coleman you can imagine what will happen


About the handicaps , the irish horses are being clearly favoured with tralation of their or to english ones




On flat
the problems are others, best pedigree are being sell to the east and a lot will depend on what Abdullah sons and Maktoums family decide to do.
The program is also a problem and Brexit will deep the problem with the prize money
 
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https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2...s-cheltenham-ireland-britain-trainers-newbury

The first proposal to emerge in response to the rout of British runners at the Cheltenham festival this year is to create an equivalent in Britain of the Dublin Racing Festival, probably at Newbury in early February. Same as Greg Wood, I doubt this addresses the nub of the issue, which in my opinion lies in the better programme and prize money in Ireland for younger horses.
 
Yes, but I hope their analysis owed rather more than being drubbed by Irish horses recently. It surely would have been pretty easy to look at the Irish handicap changes to see if UK criteria would have produced the same result. Wonder why they haven’t mentioned something like that?
 
JamesRB said:
some points made in kevin blake's latest blog

https://www.attheraces.com/blogs/ke...flecting-on-a-magnificent-cheltenham-festival
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It seems that the BHA have paid some attention to the analysis here. Blake's points about ratings inflation are unarguable.

The starting point for the BHA handicappers* when assessing performances is to check the ratings given to previous winners of the race in question, and to then award a mark at a similar level. Kevin Blake suggests that one of the reasons for this approach is a desire to maintain the dubious status of a bloated programme of Graded races.

His cure is to replace the lesser graded races with handicaps, as if we don't have enough of them already. Better instead to tweak the handicapping methodology than to scrap the majority of graded races.


* Maybe the Irish handicappers work in the same way, but we know less about this because, unlike their British colleagues, they don't publish regular explanations
 
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