Jockey Club face an even heavier burden

WHAT has been proved in the Top Cees libel case, lost by the Sporting Life, is not the innate honesty of racing, but the difficulty in establishingwhether a horse has been deliberately stopped from winning. The verdict is far from being a victory for the racing industry itself, as the Jockey Club, in announcing a further internal discussion on the issues raised at the 19-day trial, tacitly acknowledged. Whether the punter can go into the betting office this week confident that his next fiver will be invested on a horse guaranteed to be trying is open to question.

Racing has been deluding itself for centuries, but not in the way most people think. The delusion is not that the game is basically clean, which it very probably is not, even after the verdict of the High Court; the delusion is that punters really care. We have heard a lot of pious nonsense from the Jockey Club in recent weeks about the importance of maintaining public confidence in racing. Three innocent jockeys were offered up as sacrificial lambs on that particular altar.

The betting shop punter is not that much of a mug. He knows racing is devious, that the difference between the quaint offence of "schooling a horse in public", for example, and non-trying is so subjective as to be largely unprovable. He regards it as part of the game. At the starting line of any race on any day, with the exception of the very big meetings, there will be some horses just not good enough to win, some horses good enough to win, but not this week, some horses not fully fit, some running below the right distance, some running above their right distance, some running at exactly the right distance but on the wrong type of track. But because training horses is not a precise science and the only true witness is not able to speak (would Mr Justice Morland have treated Top Cees' evidence with the same suspicion as he did Derek Thompson's on the grounds that it was such a long time ago, one wonders), evidence is hard to pin down as doubtless the QCs Richard Hartley and Patrick Milmo would testify. Betting shops hold their own kangaroo courts several times in an afternoon and the conclusions are similarly unsatisfactory.

On these pages not long ago, Bill Watts, a man who knew enough about his craft to train a Classic winner, admitted that the only way he could have kept going in his profession was by masking a horse's true ability from the handicapper. But is that cheating or one of the unwritten and acceptable rules of the turf? A trainer will know, within certain parameters, the ability of a horse after a good gallop or two just as a good football coach would know instinctively from a playground kickabout roughly how far a particular boy might progress in the game. He can tell from pace, judgement of space, co-ordination, bearing, any number of qualities.

The trainer's art is to find a race his horse can win, which means not only one that suits the horse, but brings to happy fruition a combination of mysterious factors: fitness, weight, distance, ground, each of which can be deliberately or accidentally mismanaged along the way.

Listen to any interview with a winning trainer after a race at the Cheltenham Festival and you will wonder how on earth such an obvious 20-1 shot went unspotted. I mean, I should have known: last time it needed the race, the ground wasn't right, it clouted the third from last, broke a blood vessel, didn't act on a right-handed track, hadn't eaten up that morning and was having psychiatric treatment. Any half-decent trainer should be able to pull a rabbit out of a hat at a mysteriously good price if he puts his mind to it. This is part of the trade, one of the skills of training. Only incompetent trainers would need to tell a jockey to stop a horse.

A lot of trainers who do not happen to be called Michael Stoute or Henry Cecil, but have a basic love of the game and a stable of 25-30 horses of varying quality, survive by outsmarting the handicapper and backing the odd winner. "Having a touch" is the phrase, I believe. It is part of racing's exclusive lingo. Where that turns into cheating, the law of the land cannot tell us. The onus now falls more heavily than ever on the Jockey Club to make the distinction, at least until someone is able to clone a talking horse and the truth comes tumbling out. If Top Cees was granted the gift of speech, he would probably take out a libel case against anyone who suggested he couldn't win a tinpot handicap standing on his hind legs and singing a chorus of "Auld Lang Syne".

THE suspension of Dermot Gallagher from his duties as a Premiership referee this weekend is an uncomfortable new development in the increasingly anarchic relationship between football and its law enforcement officers. A number of fans and a majority of managers would be happy to have the other 18 refs on the Premiership list off duty as well, but Gallagher has every right to feel aggrieved. He has been made a scapegoat; for his colleagues, who have shipped a lot of blame this season; for the FA, who feel it is about time they were seen to be doing something; for the managers, who mark referees every Saturday while privately believing their marks go straight into some bureaucrat's WPB and, in particular, for the erroneous decision by Mike Riley not to award Barnsley a late penalty in the first FA Cup tie, thus depriving the whole of the country - for 10 days, at least - of some good sport at Manchester United's expense.

Gallagher, who has issued only two red cards this season, did not need the assessment of Philip Don, the independent observer and well-known Fifa stickler, to know that Arsenal v Chelsea on 8 February was not one of his better games. He should have sent Steve Bould off for a "professional foul", despite a recent FA seminar which highlighted that particular offence. But public humiliation is not the answer. Referees get enough of that on a Saturday afternoon.

What they need from the authorities is proper training and strong backing to ease their load and increase their confidence. Professionalism, if necessary. Why should refs not have incentives like everyone else in football. "My players wouldn't take a throw-in for that," Gordon Strachan said on hearing of the referee's pounds 200 match fee. And players and managers have to take their share of responsibility too. It is they who ultimately decide whether the game is governable or not.

Strachan, manager of Coventry City and one of the more vociferous ref baiters, has at least started to address the problem. Last week he invited Gerald Ashby to the Coventry training ground to discuss differences of interpretation and opinion, the resulting Smith and Jones tete-a-tete was featured on Central TV. Referees might justifiably feel now that a player's true form should be assessed by ratings in the Sun. Anything less than 5 out of 10 and it's away to the Pontins League for a game or two.

THE decision by MCC to exclude women from membership once more was entirely predictable. I propose a compromise. Women should be allowed to apply for membership now on the grounds that by the time their names reach the top of the waiting list, 15 or so years into the new millennium, attitudes in the Long Room - generally regarded as being on a time lag of a century - might have ventured far enough beyond the Boer War to warrant acceptance.