EARLIER this month Horse Racing Ireland unveiled the fixture list for 2022 which will see a relatively minor increase in the overall number of meetings, up by 10 to 390 from the original number of meetings scheduled to take place this year.

Those 390 fixtures are largely in keeping with what one would expect and it was interesting to see that the decision was kept to maintain the four blank Sundays in the calendar. This stood in contrast to the 18 extra Saturday and Sunday fixtures that were a notable feature of next year’s fixture list in Britain.