The long awaited announcement on Bonfire Night of the 2017 BAGS fixtures turned out to be something of a damp squib, with little announced barring a ‘Thursday all year’ BAGS schedule for Monmore (which is presumably also good news for Henlow’s RPGTV commitment) and an immediate reprieve for Sittingbourne whose BAGS deals ends in December whereby the remainder run through to 2019.

In effect, as one promoter put it, ‘the clock will now run down to zero’. Basically, the SIS contract to supply the pictures to the betting shops and streaming will continue until the end of next year with no major disruption. BAGS will then invite applications to broadcast their pictures and other players such as Attheraces and Turf TV may want to outbid SIS who reputedly charge BAGS around £12m per year for their services.

It might have gone so differently. While the remaining BAGS tracks might have felt secure with BAGS contracts in their vaults, what would have happened if SIS’s coup had worked? BAGS might have been voted out of existence and those contracts would not have been worth the paper they were written on.

So what went wrong for SIS? There were probably two main factors. The first was the amalgamation of Coral and Ladbrokes, who are share holders in SIS. Although the combined 3,500 shops made the new company a bookmaking superpower, it also changed the whole dynamic. Did the remainder headed by Hills, Paddy Power, and Betfred suddenly feel threatened by their powerful new business rival?

Secondly, the formation of the Greyhound Media Group came as a complete shock. SIS always knew that the four Ladbroke/Coral tracks couldn’t possibly supply enough content to sell to the betting industry. They presumably thought they could refer to the ‘Bookmakers Guide to Industry Domination’ under the chapter ‘Divide and Conquer’. They would simply throw some crumbs to the other greyhound tracks who would cut each others throats to sign up.There is supposedly a ‘Gordon’s list’ in circulation, from which many current BAGS hosts are absent.

However – it even sounds incredible to type this – the tracks showed some initiative and stuck together, much as the horserace tracks had previously done. While they couldn’t risk falling foul of competition law by forming a cartel, they found a way around it by selling their media rights to a new company in which they were all shareholders, in much the way that Ladbrokes and Coral sold their to SIS. One can only wonder how different the greyhound industry might be today if the Greyhound Media Group had been formed 50 years ago!

Will SIS still seek to overthrow BAGS? Possibly, but who knows how the landscape will change in the next twelve months with Towcester’s new ‘go it alone’ approach just the start. Besides, history tells us, there are few things in the universe bloodier than a failed coup attempt.