Racing can make a big splash midweek© Photo Healy Racing
It's been said this week by Willie Mullins but it's been said by so many before that and especially in the past couple of years that Racing is missing a trick not bossing midweek sporting headlines on a regular basis.
Putting our best horses, best races and stellar moments on at the Weekend, crowding action into a window of 3 or 4 hours on a Saturday and to a lesser extent Sunday makes little sense when it hasn't a hope of getting the headlines away from Jose Mourinho, Joe Schmidt, Rory McIlroy and pretty much every other sport in the publics eye line.
We have a busy schedule of live product every day, that is unique in terms of top flight sport but yet rather than boss the media attention midweek it's full of poly(track) filler and small field uncompetitive dross.
Why not move the big weekend meetings to the midweek and incentivise those involved to do so. The crowds will still go, make days of it as always and Racing will be the big news of the day rather than the ill informed clip at the end of a sports round up.
Super Saturday's are a great tagline and we have a few of them but they are vastly over subscribed even by ourselves in Racing with days of 7 and 8 meetings across the UK and Ireland a serious mistake.
Imagine if every Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday were the big days, you only have to look at Cheltenham and Royal Ascot, Punchestown and Galway to see what happens when Racing can dominate. That can be replicated with changes to the calendar to be the norm, talking points are few and far between on those days in the average sporting week and the space is just a few spreadsheets and a savvy administrator away.
Who loses out if this happens? Tricky question but perhaps if over considered then it can't be answered but in simple terms the game wins in my view. More interest when attention is not diverted, more column inches when it takes centre stage and as for the weekend we clearly have enough fixtures to still fill a racetrack or three with a fair product.
Ratings have fallen in terms of viewers for television coverage, when you move the product from 1 on the dial to 4 and so on this is expected in my view but give it back the centre stage on the day when it can dominate and that will rectify itself.
We have champions, we have celebrity but we don't maximise where we can and the weekend booze fuelled grab of a packed grandstand doesn't do what it should in terms of promoting the actual action.
Let's have a Super Wednesday rather than an Invisible Saturday.
Good luck all.
