To the hierarchy, the games are now 'a product'. It is striking how often our leaders have used this description over the last decade. This is music to corporate ears since, if the GAA is nothing more than a product, then it has a price and it can be bought. Brand experts refer to what is happening with the GAA as 'cultural expansionism'. The idea is not for the corporation to simply sponsor some event or other, but for the corporation to become so entwined with the culture that it eventually becomes the culture.

The above is an extract from a piece written by Joe Brolly in yesterday’s Sunday Independent. In the piece, Brolly talks about the GAA’s partnerships with Sky and AIB, and he worries about the possibility that those corporate organisations will, in time, take over the culture of the GAA by way of starting from the bottom up, much like how Nike has practically taken over the NBA in the States.

Brolly begins his piece by stating if the new Director General of the GAA doesn’t redraw the boundary between the ideals of the GAA and the commercial world, “we are f****d.”

If you were to make a direct equivalent comparison, you’d probably say racing is already f****d, and has been from the get go, but it really isn’t that bad, is it?

Racing and betting have been intertwined from day one. Racing was made for betting and betting prospered greatly from racing. That ratio of interdependence has probably tipped away from the betting side in the last couple of decades (with other sports becoming popular with punters) but the racing 'product' is still a huge lure, which is demonstrated in one way by the presumably large sums of money paid by big brand bookmakers to become associated with racing’s highest profile figures.

This direct link, between bookmaker and high-profile racing figure, showcases the complexity of this longstanding but now developing relationship.

On one hand, it’s great - exclusive views and information all for free online for the punter, the trainer gets paid, the trainer gets to say exactly what he wants, everyone is happy (except the journalists out of work!). On the other hand, as with the Nicky Henderson/Altior/Unibet case, something just doesn’t sit right.

Henderson is terrific with the media. Had he not been directly involved with Unibet, and so used the bookmaker as the medium to communicate the Altior news, would this case have been half the story it was? I’m not so sure. But because there was an outside party, a bookmaker, involved in disseminating the news to the betting public, there was an understandable furore.

It's not unusual to hear the complaint these days that “racing depends completely on betting, so it should be doing more to help the punter.”

Very few people within racing, perhaps only Mark Johnston, dispute the importance of the betting industry within our sport. And in a sector where other sports, most significantly football, gains in popularity with punters, of course racing should be doing as much as it can to advertise itself as a good proposition to bet on.

That said, the day when trainers start making decisions for the betting public instead of their owners, themselves and their horses is the day we are f****d as an authentic sport.

I was managing The Irish Field tweet machine yesterday and tweeted Willie Mullins’ quote about Next Destination. It read: “I don’t know if he’ll run again before Cheltenham. I’d imagine the Ballymore would be it but the with the way he jumps, he’ll get an entry for the Supreme as well.”

This is a perfectly understandable viewpoint to have, as we are now, still two months away from the festival. Yet there was criticism of such small indecision in replies to the post and that same critical viewpoint was also evident in the greater field of the Twitter-sphere.

Why would Willie Mullins want to put it in concrete now exactly which race his Grade 1 winning horse will go for at Cheltenham? It would be an illogical move. The outlook of each race at Cheltenham, especially the novice events, is cloudy, and will probably change significantly five times between now and the second week in March.

Next Destination's Cheltenham target is still up in the air

Mullins is doing what he always does - wait and see, let the horse develop, let his possible Cheltenham targets develop, and then make a decision close to the time with all information in hand. It’s how any sportsman or businessman would behave in order to give themselves every chance of success.

Yet this is a major qualm with a lot of punters. We want to know exactly where your horse is running at Cheltenham, in September, so we can have our bets on. Surely this is an unreasonable request that will never come close to the norm.

Yet racing chiefs have reacted to this need by the introduction this year of 48-hour declarations for the Festival. What next? Declarations for all Cheltenham races on the Sunday? Final fields drawn when the bookies go 'non-runner, no bet' on March 1st?

It seems to me that many punters have no appreciation for the tactics or race planning and the intricacies of managing elite racehorses. How things can change and plans thrown awry.

Originally I had been much in favour of 48-hour declarations but on hearing certain opinions of owners and trainers, I’m not so sure it’s a great idea.

For instance Eddie O’Leary said of Apple’s Jade recently: “Ideally we’d like to have her in the Stayers' Hurdle as well so if something happened to her in the Mares, like she fell early, we could possibly look at running her again - but the new rules will stop us doing that.”

Why? So that Joe Punter can have a bet on the Stayers' 48 hours in advance instead of 24 hours later. Is it really necessary?

Consider some other supposedly punter-friendly rule changes introduced recently. Ireland's non-trier rule demands that jockeys are seen to do their best as determined by 'a reasonable and informed member of the racing public'. Jockeys who make a honest mistake in a race are regularly given relatively severe punishments.

From January 19th, British racecards will carry notice of horses which have undergone wind operations though there is plenty of reason to believe the information will be of no help or, worse, misleading.

Is this all necessary to appease the betting public?

It might be fantastical now to surmise that racing is edging ever more towards becoming just another event to bet on, essentially fodder, with the means to an end primarily involving money transferring to the bookmaker.

But if the BHA and HRI were to keep making decisions with the betting industry as the main focus, this is the direction in which we're heading.

Racing has so much to offer as a sport itself. Through the horses, characters, stories and of course through betting. But a happy and fair balance has to be struck.

After Dublin's footballers won their third All Ireland last year, another Sunday Independent sports journalist Paul Kimmage criticised the players' cynical fouling in the late stages of the game. "Is winning all that matters?", he wrote. In the case of racing hopefully we don't get to the stage when we ask "Is betting all that matters?"