Recession brings promise of change for the bettor
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The news that betting was down dramatically at the Leopardstown Christmas meeting may well indicate that 2009 is going to be the year when the gambling boom ends.
The attendance at the four days of racing actually held up pretty well given the recession, dropping by a mere 2,000. But it was a different story for the Tote, down €424,000 and the on-course bookmakers, down €1,308,000.
We appear to be looking at the end of an era. Because nothing was so quintessentially Celtic Tiger as the way that betting broke into the mainstream of Irish life as never before over the past few years. No match commentary was complete without a reference to the possible ramifications of the result for the bookies, for the first time every match preview had the odds tacked on at the end, news bulletins lapped up news of the latest 'fun bets' and premature pay-outs.
We fell so madly in love with the betting milieu that even some bookmakers were treated for once in their lives as though what they said actually mattered. It's said that cocaine is God's way of telling you that you're making too much money. Betting is another one. New recruits to the gambling trade didn't just start wagering, they started doing it with a sang-froid not witnessed previously by the nation's turf accountants.
In the end, it became a bit boring. Like a youngster who's just had sex for the first time, the novice punters couldn't stop talking about their new discovery. It will come as a bit of a relief when recession returns betting to the people who've been doing it for years and will continue doing it when the tyros pull in their horns.
It's been a rough few years for the committed gambler, the kind of lad who knows that betting is not a pastime but an intensely serious pursuit and that money should not be laid down until every page in the Racing Post has been perused, every source of a possible tip followed up and every implication of previous form considered. These are the kind of guys who knew how to do a Yankee when they were ten years old and when they hear the word monkey think of a sum of money rather than a hairy primate which lives in the jungle.
Eamonn McCann described them in his great book, War and an Irish Town. "There were men in the Bogside who knew off by heart the names of every horse which won a big race in England and Ireland for the last 20 years. There were not a few who knew as well the names of the jockeys, trainers and owners and what came second and third. Not, of course, that such encyclopaedic knowledge was ever a match for the bookies' odds."
Yet these adepts of gambling have had to deal with the increasing presence in their beloved bookie shops of neophytes who bet on a whim, or because a horse is the favourite, or because they've heard of the name of the jockey or because they got a tip from a guy at work who is in reality no more of an expert than themselves. This is somewhat painful for the punting fundamentalist who must feel like Pope Benedict would if he arrived in St Peter's to find a few young priests suggesting that what would really liven the old place up would be a bit of a Folk Mass.
The era when guys would cheerfully inform you that they had bet a few hundred on a rugby or GAA match, though subsequent questioning disclosed they couldn't name more than a couple of the players on either team is probably over. From now on the betting offices of the country will, like Hong Kong being handed back to the Chinese, revert to the original tenants, men who know their Fontwell from their Fakenham and to whom the very concept of a 'fun bet,' is as offensive as a sexually explicit joke about their grandmother.
A return to normality will make the serious punter happy. Let them enjoy that happiness while it lasts. Because lurking in the imagination of bookies and paid-off politicians are the Fixed Odds Betting Terminals which will transform their haunts into low-rent casinos.
You can put your shirt on that. If you hadn't given up betting, that is.
