For those who follow the site you’d know i’ve been banging on about QLD changing up what they do to set themselves apart from the other states and get racing here in a better position. There are much smarter people than myself in charge but here’s me speaking out loud.
This week we see feature racing on a twilight Friday meeting at Doomben. I’m sure it’s mostly because of xmas parties but this is something we should really be focusing on moving forward. We are one of the only states who could race year round twilight/night racing. At least 9 months of the year anyway, you could drop the Friday nights during the winter carnival if Wednesday suits the carnival better.
You can never make everyone happy but I feel the best set up for QLD would be to make our two best meetings Friday night and Saturday. You could still race on a Wednesday and possibly Sunday. If we we’re racing Friday and Saturday I think Sunday off would be a good result for participants. (There would obviously still be one or two provincial Saturday meetings also if you raced Wednesday)
Racing Friday’s with good fields all year round sets us apart and gives us a great position with whoever gets the television rights. We are already getting bugger all time of a Saturday. If we were to have good racing on a Friday night on a much quieter schedule, we would get a lot more airtime, more interest in the product and more people punting on QLD racing. We could make the Friday meetings run from around 3:30pm-8pm and make them 9 race cards. We already have lights at the Sunny Coast and with lights going in at the Gold Coast we’d be mad not to consider something like this mentioned. We have far too much racing as it is so let’s have two very good/premium meetings run at prime time to get the best bang for our buck.
For too long we have been dictated to by what other states do and we just keep doing the same thing. We put up with varying coverage (sometimes below avg), we race the same days and not a lot has changed in a long time. Personally I just feel something has to change or we are just going to fall further behind the two main states. This isn’t a whinge about QLD racing, we have a great product and we’ve had prizemoney increases, I just feel we need to look outside the same old box.
“If you always do what you’ve always done, you’ll always get what you’ve always got.”
