Williams complains that “confidential information was leaking out of the WPBSA office” – just the sort of thing that does tend to happen from within unpopular regimes.However, Williams would certainly have my support in ascertaining how the WPBSA letter of 2 January, threatening to ban Stephen Hendry – indeed, all my players – if I made remarks the Board did not like, come to be reproduced in the News of the World before Stephen knew of it.Snooker is a wonderful product which has, by and large, been badly managed over two decades. However, does part of the answer lie in other managements not delivering to their clients the range of services and contracts that mine does?Williams did not mention this distaste a year ago when my votes were instrumental in disposing of an administration whose gross mismanagement he agreed at the time was bringing snooker to its knees.Williams does not mention either that my support of him and boardroom colleagues of his selection including Wildman and Chambers was conditional on the association’s day- to-day business being run by a chief executive within a proper manage- ment structure. No one makes me come ‘ere, it’s a good life.”And Bolton was smart enough to stow something away from the good times, just to lend a bit of gilt to his retirement. He is 63 now and his two sons are ready to inherit the family pitch, hard won through years of erosion in the ranks.

Bolton had his first bet at the age of eight, bought his first “tools” (bag, board and stand) for pounds 25 from the local garage owner, set up at Walthamstow dogs with nothing in his pocket, went broke, saved for another two years and started for real on the racetrack in 1967. He works the southern tracks, less often than he used now that he can watch the Racing Channel for a fiver and save himself a bout of midwinter pneumonia.It has taken him 31 years to graduate from the junior ranks in the third row to a decent pitch at the front, three or four off the best stand of the lot, near the rails. “At the front, you can see what everyone else is doing, but they can’t see you.” On a desultory day at Plumpton, the advantage means little; on money- spinning days at Royal Ascot and the Cheltenham Festival you need all the help you can get.Even in an industry notoriously averse to change, the oncourse bookmakers inhabit a world of timeless practice. Clerks write down the bets in ancient ledgers, bookies call the odds. Signalling the odds down two-way radios not in semaphore is about as far as the revolution has penetrated. But on the grounds that “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”, the system has survived Three million on course bets last year, 41 complaints “Can’t be that bad, can it?” Bolton says. “I’m as willing to change as anyone, but how can you better the system?”Bolton feels the on-course bookie has suffered enough from social change without the meddling of racecourses wanting a tax on turnover.

Punters used to creature comforts no longer venture out to the ring when they can bet happily inside and watch the television; wages are paid into banks not back pockets. “If you had pounds 200 in your pocket you’d be more likely to come out and have a good bet,” Bolton says. “But going to the bank and taking out pounds 200 for an afternoon’s betting You wouldn’t do it, would you?” And Bolton is in the stalls. Others are worse off.Down in the cheaper enclosure, the Silver Ring, Tony Lusardi is pricing up the opening race. He reckons if 60 bookmakers go bust and he invents a miracle drug to prolong life, he might reach the hallowed ground of the Tattersalls halfway through the next millennium.