Sydney's best race caller, Mark Shean, knocking back the offer to replace Darren Flindell rings some alarm bells as far as the Jockey Club's aim of getting a "name" caller, repoerts the Racing Post in Hong Kong.
The club has been fortunate in the past with relatively junior callers like Flindell, and David Raphael before him.
Neither was high on the batting order when he left Australia but each blossomed here. It's probably fair to say that another of their predecessors, Richard Hoiles, a top British caller now for some years, also fell into that young, up-and-comer category before his Hong Kong stint.
Hong Kong racing is an ideal vehicle for that - two tracks, relatively few horses or human participants, or races for that matter, which enables the callers to learn the idiosyncrasies of their subject and be ready for them in the run. Along with the back stories, they are all facets of the action that can be highlighted in calls to colour them up. In somewhere like Australia, a caller has to deal often with many horses previously unseen, as Flindell has been finding out since his return to Sydney.
So Hong Kong has been a great place to polish up the act for young, developing callers.
What's that you say? Why not try that again? Well, that might have been the ideal process had there been no such thing as commingling.
The English language commentary team is the club's window to the world, if you like.
Its worth has long been denigrated by some Jockey Club executives doing the maths on the proportion of money wagered by English speakers. Even the computer betting syndicates, turning over billions a season and mostly English speakers, weren't considered a reason to spruce things up.
But "here" is no longer the only consideration.
The commingling turnover at the Jockey Club from punters in the US, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore and wherever else it goes in the future is expected to soon be a HK$100 million a meeting business. That's more than US$1 billion a season, and growing. It might not be all the money in the world, in the grand scheme of the Jockey Club, but it's a pretty decent-sized business, and requires a good English-language interface to help it grow.
That's why the club was expressing a certain keenness this time to get a "known" caller. Apparently not keen enough. The deal with Shean might have swung on something as simple as an accommodation over accommodation. Now the deal with the next "name" could swing on something similar.
Another very well-known Australian caller, from somewhere about as west of Sydney as you can get, is said to be in the picture for at least a chat.
But the view from abroad that Hong Kong Jockey Club equals big money employment is true for only a very few positions in the club. In every other role, it's part salary/part privilege to work here.
We doubt the Jockey Club can afford this new "name" player anyway but the accommodation side of the equation will end all discussions. And we would expect that to be the case with any well-established caller from anywhere.
Apparently the policies and benchmarks of the past eras place low ceilings on the offerings for certain positions and, unless someone with clout reviews those for the English commentary team, then this looks like another opportunity for a young unknown caller somewhere out there, by default.