Cranbourne Cup backflip!

By Brad Kingsbury
THE Cranbourne Turf Club committee last week voted to ditch the Sunday Cranbourne Cup experiment after two lacklustre years.
The club’s annual feature meeting will revert back to its traditional Wednesday afternoon date that was a standard fixture for 46 years before it was changed in 2006.
Club chairman Robin Daley said that the decision was made after all aspects of the last two cup meetings were assessed.
“We had a two-year trial to run the cup meeting on a Sunday and it was not the success it could have been,” he said.
“Numbers were down on expectations and it lacked the prestige of our old Wednesday cup.”
Although crowd numbers were satisfactory, Mr Daley said the business community had not taken to the weekend fixture and the club wanted to grow the event across all sections of the community.
“That was a problem on the Sundays. The corporate sector was not as interested and Sunday is still seen by many in business as a family day at home,” he said.
“We had competition from the Phillip Island (Moto) Grand Prix and the problems associated with the equine flu this year, but over the two years we believe the Sunday was not as attractive to people as the Wednesday.
“We have the infrastructure to cater for more people and we want to increase the growth in support and make use of the excellent corporate area facilities we have,” Mr Daley said.
Club chief executive Neil Bainbridge agreed, saying that Sunday before the Caulfield Cup was seen by many in the racing industry as too close to the spring feature.
Mr Bainbridge said that Cranbourne trainers and district racing people had been canvassed about the Sunday cup and the majority had indicated that the Wednesday provided a better lead in to the Caulfield Cup and a better quality field was more likely if the meeting was changed back to the midweek date.
“We want to ensure the best quality field with the Caulfield Cup in mind and that is more likely on the Wednesday,” he said.
“We already have some good quality Sunday meetings and we intend to promote them and make them bigger events to cater for the different weekend crowd.”
A deputation of Cranbourne officials will approach Racing Victoria Limited (RVL) to put their case for the change prior to Christmas.
“We would expect the full support of RVL. We work closely with RVL along with Country Racing Victoria and will discuss the decision before they set the final schedule early in the new year.”