KEEP YOUR WHITS ABOUT YOU, CARTMEL

Better late than delayed interminably, the 2015 Rules Fixture List was finally released, blinking and naked but no less sizeable than its immediate predecessors, onto the BHA website today. 

Evidence of the most extensive consultation process in recent times was promised; the subjecting of the (re)allocation of fixtures to a set of more forensic, performance-driven criteria than before would, it was inferred, be impossible to miss.

Maybe.  Truth be told, an initial glance at the list reveals no seismic consequences wrought by that process, but like the Magic Eye pictures briefly and madly popular about two decades ago, perhaps a longer stare at the calendar of 1,471 events programmed (a net rise of seven on 2014) will start to reveal them.  This blog post is unlikely to represent your author’s only comment on the list - not by a long chalk.

One significant change to which the eyes were instantly drawn, however, was one concerning Cartmel's fixtures programme for 2015, with the Lakeland idyll now upping its portfolio to eight racedays but losing its Whit Saturday evening allocation to Salisbury.

Is that by design?  Given Lord Cavendish's insistences in racecards in recent years how pivotal Bank Holiday racing is to Cartmel's business model, it’s not wise to assume that it definitely is. 

There are still two days' racing at the track in May, albeit on Whit Monday and the following Wednesday, and logic would suggest that holding on to the Saturday and losing the Wednesday would have represented the ideal.  The latter is practically always comfortably the least well-attended of the three days’ racing at the Cumbria track over Whit week, and indeed has trailed in as the course’s least well-attended fixture of the whole year in six of the past ten years, whereas the Bank Holiday Saturday fixture has yet to attract a paying crowd of under 6,000 on any occasion so far this century and is surely nothing to give up lightly.

There is, it would be an understatement to say, a following for and expectation of Whit Saturday racing at Cartmel dating back some four decades now; a following which, if turned away for what may even be just a year, might just quickly get used to the idea of not coming back.

Either way, the Cartmel programme now comprises two-day meetings on each of the four months from May to August, including the first ever Sunday fixture on June 28th (in competition with Uttoxeter's Summer Cup fixture). At last, the country's final pocket of resistance against Sabbath racing acquiesces.  As a nod to more godly pursuits than lobbing money at competitive thoroughbreds in between raids on the famous Village Shop, however,will this now become the meeting upon which Cartmel’s long-established practice of blessing a racehorse takes place?

That aside, it's disappointing to observe that there's nothing for Northern-based jumps connections or enthusiasts at Cartmel or elsewhere for an entire month between Perth's mid-July and mid-August fixtures.

Sedgefield won't race any sooner during high summer than late-August anymore, and Hexham have never entertained July and August fixtures, but somewhere ought to step into the breach to bridge what otherwise constitutes the entire calendar year’s longest break without National Hunt action north of the M62.  

Where’s left, though - Kelso?  Aintree?  Heaven forfend as its embracing of Flat racing starts to take off in earnest during 2015, but – Wetherby?