WHO'LL TAKE THE DROP FOR TAKING AWAY THE DROP FENCES?

Tellwright, Tellwright, lama sabachthani?

You may remember that the very first That Racing Blog post of the lot, back in mid-October of last year, meditated on an evident sea-change at Haydock Park, the first sign of which appeared to be the substituting of a number of portable fences for permanent obstacles down the back straight. At the time I wrote that:

The Lancashire venue will never not be a galloper's track, but let's hope its status as a proper jumper's track need not be placed in too much doubt hereafter.

Sadly, events since that posting have confirmed that those three portafences simply represented the tip of the iceberg, and National Hunt racing at Haydock as we have known it for decades came to an end over fences at Easter, and over hurdles with the Swinton meeting a month later.

The 2007-8 season will usher in a revised program consisting of a reduced number of meetings, and – as utterly inadvertently predicted in that October posting – one strip of turf only will be used for both hurdle and chase races on the inside of the course, so that two Flat tracks may be maintained outside of it. To that end, even my hope that the course will “never not be a galloper’s track” looks a slightly forlorn one now.

Clerk of the Course Kirkland Tellwright is not the first bearer of his surname with a bit of “previous” where contentious racecourse decisions are concerned, Bill Tellwright having presided over the closure of Woore, one of the slew of Rules tracks to disappear during the 1960s. Heavily involved with the North Staffordshire Hunt point-to-point fixture, then run at nearby Mucklestone, Bill essentially bought up the assets of Woore when it was given an Easter Saturday fixture that was given to pool so extensively from the same local spectator / horse base as Mucklestone as to decimate patronage.

That was over 40 years ago, however, and simply concerned killing off an infrequently-used Rules racecourse so that a point-to-point venue – which, to be fair, survived until 1982, before all concerned moved the meeting to a new site in Sandon – could flourish. Kirkland Tellwright’s presiding over such a seismic alteration to one of the premier jumps courses in the North, if not the entire country, constitutes iconoclasm on a greater scale altogether.

He has cited welfare issues for both the replacement of all the incumbent stiff fences and also the work now in progress to flatten out the drops on the landing sides of many, yet to this pair of eyes few courses in the country have jumped as well as Haydock over the years. A proper, galloping track with time in between the constituent fences in its two rows (home and back straight) for horses to get into a rhythm, the big, stiff fences compel chasers to learn and maintain good habits of jumping.

It is that compulsion which has so endeared the place to the likes of Gordon Richards, both generations of McCain and owner Trevor Hemmings over the decades. Indeed, the last-named’s buying policy could almost be regarded as one of finding “Haydock Horses” as much as it is “Aintree Horses”, both venues having always been the preserve of his favoured big, strong chasing types. The annoyance expressed by the likes of McCain Snr and Hemmings in the trade press after the full extent of the changes was revealed in late February clearly registered as no surprise, therefore.

Nor, sadly, did the rather less voluble support for the old course from the likes of Paul Nicholls and Philip Hobbs when interviewed at the same time. I've long despaired of certain of the top trainers' complaints over how few opportunities there are for high-class animals (particularly in novices' chases), yet when some such are presented to them at Haydock and Wetherby, courses where - horror of horrors - they'd need an animal which can, you know, jump a bit, they are conspicuously absent.

Haydock's chases have always deserved to be better patronised numerically than they have been for a long time, but not even appearance money or the covering of travelling expenses has been able to bolster turn-out in these as often as not. Suggesting the failure of Hobbs, Nicholls, etc. to support the track better directly lead to the changes at the venue would, of course, be extraordinarily unwise, but their patronage of it has certainly left a bit to be desired. Further, any mitigating argument that Haydock is too far away from their respective Somerset training bases to encourage the trip to it pales when it is considered that:

- Haydock’s location hard up against a prominent junction of the M6 could hardly be more ideal,
- Peter Bowen and Evan Williams will still entertain trips from South Wales to the Sedgefields of this world all year round,
- Team Pipe has been a regular visitor for many years.

Speaking of visitors, the Racing Post article of February 27th outlined the economic case against staging so many National Hunt meetings at the track. Evidently not even 3,000 visitors attended the latest Peter Marsh Chase meeting, and competition from football and rugby league matches was cited.

However, these other distractions have always been there – if not more so then than nowadays, given that the Super League is primarily a spring and summer contest – but Haydock managed to pull bigger crowds for renewals of that and other winter meetings previously, including in some of the filthiest, coldest, wettest winter days imaginable. There were far more than 3,000 present when I first visited the course back on Red Square (or antecedent) Gold Cup day in 1999, and there was no reason to believe the "Clash of the Anti-Titans" between Quixall Crossett and Monaughty Man on the undercard that afternoon had swollen the crowds to anything particularly unusual for the course for the period.

Could there be another reason for the decrease in numbers through the turnstiles, therefore? Has there, perhaps, been a misplaced confidence in recent times that a card containing Graded contests sells itself without further recourse to promotion; that the Haydock half of the North West Masters double-header (with Aintree), Betfair Chase and all, automatically offers a greater attraction for the leisure pound than a routine Premiership match at Liverpool, Everton, Bolton, Wigan or the two Manchester clubs?

Few are the racecourses outside of the big Festival and Classic venues - probably only Towcester (free) and Cartmel (quirky and endearingly picturesque) - that could genuinely afford such a casual attitude to self-promotion; not that Towcester, with its frequent advertising on Attheraces does, you understand.

Whatever the causes of the drastic changes visited upon Haydock, the effects of those changes are likely to take a year or two to become fully apparent. The first change is only too apparent – the new jumps season at the Lancashire track will not commence until November 24th, Betfair Chase day itself and almost certainly the latest such start ever (certainly all of five weeks later than last season). With online fora and certain sections of the press alive with suggestions earlier in the year that a Grade 1 chase simply cannot be run over portable fences, it seems reasonable to assume there will be some very critical eyes cast over events that Saturday afternoon.