Take pleasure and pride from the 177th Grand National - and focus not on how to stop Willie Mullins but how to salute him

It was oh so different 50 years ago. It was also so much worse.

The 1975 Grand National gave Red Rum his initial shot at becoming the first three-time winner of the world's greatest steeplechase. His effort that afternoon ended in heroic failure. The day itself was an abysmal failure. It is now widely accepted that the total attendance at Aintree on Saturday, April 5, 1975, was just 9,000. Exactly half a century later, Nick Rockett's victory for Willie and Patrick Mullins was seen on course by a bumper crowd of 59,920. Ignore those who say everything was better in the good old days.

In the Grand National's long and tumultuous history, there have been all too many times when the race and its home looked finished, but perhaps never more so than in 1975. The track's then owner Bill Davies almost brought Aintree to its knees. Prior to that 1975 Grand National meeting – you could never have called it a festival – he decided to triple the admission prices. The public reacted accordingly. There was even a suggestion Davies wanted to extend the cost of entering the track to jockeys.