NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN...... to tread softly and carry a big stick.The original of this was "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." That's if you were wondering, and believe it or not it's a typewriter practice sentence. It contained seventy spaces if you popped the full stop (period) on the end - one typewriter line. Neat, huh?Oh well, down to business. I've got my grump hat on.It's been too many years since some of us bold crusaders tried to

NOW IS THE TIME FOR ALL GOOD MEN...

... to tread softly and carry a big stick.

The original of this was "Now is the time for all good men to come to the aid of their country." That's if you were wondering, and believe it or not it's a typewriter practice sentence. It contained seventy spaces if you popped the full stop (period) on the end - one typewriter line. Neat, huh?

Oh well, down to business. I've got my grump hat on.

It's been too many years since some of us bold crusaders tried to sort the silly "early markets" that appear in the papers, and even in some specialist papers. Yet they're still there. Just today I can see prices (to use the wrong term, but we have to live with it) that do not go near correlation with what the bookmakers are offering online.

And we know which set of prices will go up for genuine sale. Certainly not the fanciful papers' sets.

The big questions have always been, "Where do these make-believe prices come from? Who are the framers?"

I've never managed to get to the bottom of that. The "experts" prefer to remain anonymous.

No surprise there! If you were as bad as they are, you'd be anonymous too.

But you know what? Blokes who really know their racing will tell you that So and So is $21, when you know that the price simply is not available. I've got over having newspapermen tell me that a horse is 10/1 when its "price" is $10. You know and I know that it's 9/1, but the decimal swindle was totally successful and I'd venture to estimate that a huge majority of punters think $10 means ten to one. Saints preserve us.

So where do these figures come from?

Don't know.

Why, when there are several top bookmaking firms these days, can't one be asked to supply some reasonably accurate guesses?

Or take the TAB. TAB Ltd is advertising its head off that it's now a bookie. OK, fine, invite their odds specialists to frame markets for the rank and file punters.

Sure, they'd have to do it Thursday afternoon at the latest. Is anyone seriously going to tell me that these people aren't doing exactly that anyway?

An example? American Crew $5.50 both papers, and in a top specialist paper.

Best online around $3.50. That's a hell of a difference; it's 5/2 best and not 9/2.

I still wince at seeing, early last year, a highly paid top writer maintain that "any price about a winner is a good price". I should have clipped the quote. If it had been tongue in cheek, that would have been fine, but he meant it!

And thousands and thousands of punters would have read it.

The saddest thing of all is that many of them will continue to believe it, along with the make-believe prices, for ever and ever.