Regular columnist, greyhound owner, breeder and professional punter Gary Noble asks whether the greyhound industry would benefit from a re-think on trap draws:
Lack of any designated wide runners qualifying for the Derby Final is one thing, perhaps this years wide runners were just not up to it, lets accept that.
What I think is less acceptable is the way dogs have been seeded throughout this Derby and indeed throughout most previous Derbies. I believe I the basis of a better way of seeding and drawing open races , the Derby in particular, would be to allow dogs to be seeded differently from the current rails, middle, and wide tags.
Why not let them be seeded indicating what their ideal trap number would be.
For example:
Rails (1):Rails (2):Middle (3): Middle (4): Wide (5):Wide (6)
This would surely lead to more “honest” seeding tags being applied in the first instance, which in turn should lead to less controversy and cases of “tactical” seeding which currently goes on.
To use this years final as an example, in my opinion (not saying I’m totally correct by the way) I would have seeded the finalists as follows:
| Runner | Official Seeding | My Seeding |
| 1 Magical Bale | (rails) | (middle 3) |
| 2 Ballymac Tas | (rails) | (rails 2) |
| 3 Priceless Blake | (rails) | (rails 2) |
| 4 Skywalker Logan | (rails) | (rails 1) |
| 5 Droopys Expert | (rails) | (rails 2) |
| 6 Clonbrien Prince | (rails) | (middle 3) |
As they came out of the drum on Monday, using my seedings, this would have lead to the draw looking like this:
1 Skywalker Logan
2 Ballymac Tas
3 Priceless Blake
4 Droopys Expert
5 Magical Bale
6 Clonbrien Prince
Not ideal, but in my opinion a much fairer draw all round. Not begrudging any of these dogs their place in the final but there might well have been a different final six if the seeding had been done this way from the start.
In Category One competitions or competitions with at least 3 rounds a “VAR” type panel or a person appointed should be allowed to overule ill judged or plain wrongly designated preferred seedings . Head on videos should be available and studied after races and these can be used to make the difficult task explainable and understandable.
Another thing that could easily be adopted is to have all draws done by computer. It would be a straight forward job for a programmer to devise the software to do the draws taking into account all the seedings and the guarded runners where applicable.
A computer generated draw would not need to ruin the anticipation and excitement of a “human” draw as the dogs can be generated one by one heat by heat and announced in the same way as live draws are done at the moment. Most people accept that random computer generated draws are more preferable to draws where there is a human element. It would take away the possibility of mistakes and potential re-draws.
I think at least there should be some debate or consultation regarding seedings as very few people seem happy with the current system.
Gary Noble
