Racing League boss 'a little bit disappointed' by field sizes as every race fails to fill on opening night

The Racing League's chief executive has vowed to tackle poor crowd numbers as the competition returns at Yarmouth on Thursday evening, but he is disappointed that none of the races on the curtain-raising card has attracted full field sizes.

Each of the seven races, which will be broadcast live on ITV4, had a maximum field size of 14 runners, but only 76 have been declared for the meeting from a possible full-field quota of 98. More than 400 horses were engaged at the initial entry stage.

The feature £100,000 1m2f handicap has the biggest field with 13 declared, but the opening 5f nursery has attracted just eight runners. Team Scotland do not have a runner in the first three races, and have just five representatives on the card overall.

While Jeremy Wray still has faith in the Racing League, he is keen to understand why the numbers did not hold up better from the entry stage.

He said: "I’m a little bit disappointed by the field sizes, but we struggled last year due to the timing and other options elsewhere, and we can't necessarily do nurseries this early. We’ve got the buy-in of trainers and owners, as you could see by the entries. Where are those horses? We’ve got to answer that."

Responding to wider criticism of the concept, he added: "I have total belief in it. People are copying it in Australia and America. We haven’t been brave enough with some of the innovation, but one of the key things for me is we’ve got to have competitive fields in all races."

Racing Post columnist Lee Mottershead labelled crowd figures "hugely disappointing" in his Monday column after just 7,935 racegoers attended the events last year, with the finale at Newcastle attracting only 840 people.

However, Wray hopes those numbers will improve for the third instalment of the competition, pointing to several initiatives designed to drive up attendances.

Jeremy Wray: "We haven’t been brave enough with some of the innovation"

"I picked up on Lee’s piece on audiences and he’s right," Wray said. "Of the various things we were driving last year we probably didn’t do enough with the audience. A lot of the initiatives this year are very audience oriented. What’s a good number this year? We need to get into the several thousands for each meeting.

"We’ve made a big effort to get bigger audiences, so I’m pretty hopeful we’re going to do that. We have all sorts of promotions on tickets, which you may have seen team managers Matt Chapman and Frankie Dettori pushing on social media.

"We have other things coming out in the next few days, including an interactive game with on-the-day prizes and a new partnership to announce, which is in the process of being rubber stamped."

On the on-track changes made for this year, he said: "We’ve got a £100,000 race and that’s pretty special at places like Yarmouth, Chepstow and Wolverhampton, while having Frankie involved will hopefully drive an audience. It’s just trying to tweak things to make it better."

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