A 'CHECK' THAT BOUNCED BACK

Robert Cooper raises a toast to happy days racing in the year ahead

- Robert Cooper

Happy New Year! As time rattles on, my glass half-full approach to our glorious sport will continue unabated. My regular £1 Lucky 15s may not fi ll the ‘Black Hole’ caused by a £3billion drop in betting turnover but I’m doing my utmost to get racing back on an even keel.

Affordability checks have been the punter’s bugbear; many have decided to stop betting altogether. I have only been subjected once to this most intrusive procedure - and it turned out that the bookie asking the questions had carelessly allowed a decimal point to slip a couple of digits to the right making my modest defi cit of £50 over a certain period into what would surely have become a personal catastrophe of £5,000. Apologies were accepted, a daft error made good; it’s a shame though that my bank hasn’t made a similar boo-boo.

Of course problem gamblers should be supported but not at the expense of regular punters, the overwhelming majority take full responsibility for their investments, as they are likely to do for their everyday fi nancial transaction. The sledgehammer is far too powerful for the nut it is attempting to crack. Gambling isn’t the only occupation that requires self-control; nearly every aspect of our lives requires guidelines. My godfather, who entered the betting shop in the sky many decades ago, was a fanatical punter. Even on his deathbed, the betting shop commentary had been wired to his room. As an impressionable child, I vividly recall him propelling the phone out of the window on to the lawn when he was unable to contact his bookmaker before the ‘off’. Naturally his fancy hosed up. These were pre-area-code days, when you had to ring the operator when making a call outside your local area.

Maybe that distant memory made me think ‘ there must be something in this racing game’.