10 Hopes And Dreams For Festival 2015

1An oldie but a goldie - cut out the flag-waving. It is juvenile and chippy. Cheltenham is built on the Anglo-Irish rivalry but wrapping the green flag around every Irish winner jars with the nature of that rivalry. And anyone who says it is 'just-a-bit-of-fun' will be entitled to ignore the baggage that automatically goes with flag-waving in these islands when a UK trained winner comes back to the Punchestown winners enclosure festooned in Union Jacks and it gets dismissed as 'just-a-bit-of-fun.'

2 If, as most of us hope, Irish trained horses do well this week, can it not be treated as a convenient excuse to paper over fundamental issues with racing here. Cheltenham is the meeting that defines so much in the National Hunt game but it is worrying that success there can be used as a cosmetic veneer to cover up problems within the other fifty one weeks of the year.

Next week the issue of the industry's squeezed middle, which isn't so much squeezed as collapsed and wheezing, will still be there. As will assumptions that if you throw enough prizemoney at the problem wall enough of it will stick to solve whatever's ailing Irish racing. It won't, and twenty winners this week isn't going to be enough to change that.

3This is National Hunt racing's greatest meeting. It doesn't get better. So if what's happening out on this track isn't good enough to get public attention then a disinterested public are not going to be pulled in by anything within racing at any time. But can that be taken as simple reality and tawdry exercises in B-list 'slebs' parading around in return for supposed profile among the wider disinterested world be dispensed with?

It shows a fundamental lack of self-confidence within a sport or an industry that it feels the need to sell itself through celebrity rather than what the whole thing is actually about.

4When even Jonjo O'Neill admits he sometimes wonders if too much of jump racing's essence gets crammed into one meeting, then it might be worthwhile in the midst of everything going on this week to ponder if Cheltenham is actually too big.

"The whole season goes into one meeting," O'Neill pointed out recently before also pointing out how the first question after winning a E150,000 race can be which festival race - worth fifty grand - will the winner be aimed at next. Defining a sport by Cheltenham is one thing. But is there a threat in over-definition.

5And while we're on that topic, can those with ambitions to turn the festival even bigger, and adding a fifth day, look up from their balance sheets and realise it is quality that sells Cheltenham, not quantity. Those of us who believe the cream is already spread thin enough may be hopelessly under-qualified in terms of economics and marketing but we are among those who actually go. Keep spreading and you eventually run out.

6Can the bookmakers tone it down a little with the 'beal-bocht' stuff please? It may be your most important turnover meeting of the year but the hard-sell has gone overboard. So if all four Willie Mullins hotpots come in on Day One, it would be nice if press-releases about supposedly getting reduced to bread and water could be pruned for hysteria.

Everyone knows there is a co-relation between losing on a day and the PR value that comes with consequently whingeing about it in the media. Sometimes you can't buy such headlines and that's a 'one hand moisturising the other' deal between bookies and media that will hardly be the greatest sin committed this week. But still.

7Actually this is a prediction: anyone fearing controversy over the whip this year can relax. In fact any jockey handed a ban this week can assume it would have been double the penalty at any other time of the year. The last thing British racing wants is negative headlines about whip-happy jockeys. And when those in charge of promoting the sport are rowing the same boat as those employed to police it then it's hard not to suspect it won't be just press and bookies whose hands will be mutually moisturising.

8It mightn't be popular but it is possible to have some sympathy with the stewards and officials on the ground this week. The reality that they're working with a badly out-of-whack rulebook was never better illustrated than by last year's Gold Cup enquiry. That Lord Windermere was allowed hang on to the race was possibly justifiable in the strict terms of that book. But even the most myopic of gormless 'sleb' could see in that instance how the law really can be asinine and needs urgent attention.

9There will be equine casualties this week, probably some fatalities too. That's a stark reality of jump racing and never more so than when competition is at its most intense. Those of us in thrall to the game have at some stage, maybe even unwittingly, come to a thought process which allows us live with the idea of animals losing their lives in a system designed for human entertainment.

That no one wants that to happen, or that the thoroughbred as a species is designed for nothing else but to race, contributes to that process but not everyone is the same. So if or when it happens, racing should, and is capable of, responding to accusations of cruelty with a balanced, cogent argument which states that everything that can be done to make an essentially dangerous sport as safe as possible has been done.

What shouldn't happen though is some reactionary circling of the racing wagons.

10This one is personal: can Cheltenham stop getting compared to the Olympics? Why compare yourself to a bloated farrago of dope-riddled suspicion? What's going to happen this week will be a damn sight cleaner and honest.

Enjoy!