Those who had already dismissed the notion of another rousing scrap for the Flat jockeys' championship might be thinking again, after comments made last week by the joint champion and his successor-elect.

Ryan Moore is 2-7 favourite to regain the title he lost - largely through prolonged injury - last summer. Restored to full fitness, he would have been a skimpy price even before the confirmation of his new retainer with Sir Michael Stoute. But, even acknowledging Moore's deliberately downbeat demeanour, he has not been reassuring to those who have taken the odds.

“When I won the championship I felt I didn't have to break sweat,” he said last week. “If it happens [again], it happens, but I'm not going to be running round the country after it. I'm not going to Musselburgh for it, or to Wolverhampton on a wet Saturday night.”

Compare this with the fired-up approach of Seb Sanders as he sets out to defend the crown he shared so thrillingly with Jamie Spencer. “I can't wait to go hard at it again this season,” Sanders said. “I think there's only one way you can go about this job. It's either all or nothing.”

Moore will naturally be rather more focused than his remarks might suggest, but Stoute himself may be glad if he applies some caution to his workload, as Spencer is evidently intent on doing.

Sanders, who still resents the mandatory restrictions on his schedule far more than any other jockey, will be head-down and flat out as soon as he returns from suspension on Thursday. And,

with the admiration he attracted last year, his agent will be just as busy as he is.

The message that this is not a one-jockey season is reinforced by two of the winning riders at the opening meeting at Doncaster on Saturday. For different reasons, Alan Munro and Robert Winston missed all of last year but they have returned with the loyalty of trainers intact, plainly ready to add to an intriguing mix.

The grandly fanfared fixtures review found itself eased off the stage by fallout from another dire Levy deal when the British Horseracing Authority (BHA) staged its inaugural conference last month. A detailed report, though, will go before the BHA board next month and some recommendations should be implemented in the 2009 list.

Finance will be an issue, of course, but quite apart from the weightiest matters, such as a cull of the worst all-weather horses and a bolstering of Sunday programmes, there are glaring anomalies in the schedule which can be remedied cheaply and quickly.

Yesterday's fare was shameful, with no flat race and only two over jumps worth £5,000 to the winner. And, now that the turf Flat season is underway, how can the programme from Wednesday to Friday this week - with seven all-weather cards and not one on grass - possibly be defended?

Christine Dunnett, the Norfolk trainer accused of spoiling an attempted boycott of a maiden race at Yarmouth yesterday, did not, after all, get her walkover winner. The meeting was abandoned because of snow, doubtless to the relief of a racecourse whose owners - Northern Racing - had brought this fiasco on themselves through years of neglecting prize-money.

If the abandonment was ironic, so too is the fact that the abiding impression of this affair will not be

of an admirably motivated protest but of trainers falling out among themselves.

Dunnett felt victimised and bullied by grander trainers, of whom Mark Johnston told her she should be “ashamed”. Yet this was an unofficial boycott, convened by gallops chat, faxes and phone calls. Had it been done at the behest of the National Trainers' Federation, with proper notice given to all, it would have had more clout and credibility.