October
MayPretend friend
I notice that the death of a horse in the first jumps race of the Warrnambool carnival was immediately installed as the second-top story on the Herald Sun website, behind only the killing of Osama Bin Laden.
How much longer do Tabcorp and the racing industry propose to subsidise the increasingly poor form guide of this lacklustre rag, whose clear editorial policy is to kill off a branch of the sport that is supported by almost all its participants as well as by Racing Victoria itself (officially, at least)?
Surely in this day and age it’s time to look for ways in which this money could be better spent, for example:
• bringing free internet formguides up to the standard of those available for racing in many overseas jurisdictions, notably Hong Kong;
• printing and distributing free to newsagents and TABs a basic (but still better than the Hun’s) form guide — if Thursday acceptances were brought forward to Monday this need only be printed twice a week, on Monday afternoon for Tuesday-Wednesday-Thursday racing and on Thursday afternoon for Friday-Saturday-Sunday-Monday; and/or
• providing free printing facilities in TABs and pubTABs to allow patrons to print out A4-size form for each meeting they are interested in — these A4 guides should also be available for free download and printing at home.
The Herald Sun has been a pretend friend to racing for a number of years now while milking whatever it can get from the sport. The days of the newspaper are numbered so now is the time for racing to get ahead of the game.
Castlemaine (Vic)