IF horseracing is the sport of kings then dugs are the sport of the hoi polloi, and within greyhound competitions the people throw up their own monarchy, a bit like Dumas' King of the Beggars really. But I will tell you this: you will get less ermine at the dog-tracks, but just as much fun for half the price.

Did I say that? Friday night at the Ashfield track cost me 10 quid, thanks to a tip from a bookie who asked to be unnamed. I will call him Slim Sommerville. Considering that Victory Day, a big dog with plenty of form, was likely to make my fortune and that well-known punter Colin Scholes, who had his own dog, Banshee Five, winning in the eighth race, also put me on to this, I should have known better. I punted with young Davie Millar, the bookie. Another thing I should have considered. Davie tried to put me off, fur ma ain sake like. A mutt called Zanzibar beat my cur easy. A sadder and not wiser man. I'd lost two races before to a dog called Record Greed. I'm not even lucky in love.

Not to worry. It was a grand night. Started at seven, Friday, cold with your breath solid but there were tea bars and hot-food takeways around the stadium. Also a licensed bar, for don't forget that this is the Ashfield Stadium, where the footy chaps play, and part of the facilities even include the rather splendid Ashfield bar and lounge where the public can mingle with the stars of that junior football club. Ashfield was once a very wealthy club but is so no longer though the public house, as I have mentioned in the past, puts a fair amount into the football club, and sustains much of the team finances.

But Ashfield is also the venue for dog-racing, and, after many years lying in a desultory desuetude, it has been revived for the dogs. Much of this is due to a remarkable young fellow, Edgar - Eddie - Ramsay. He owned the famous Powderhall in Edinburgh, though that is now closed due to Lothian Region which now proposes to build houses on a site which once was the arena not just for fast dogs but also for very fast athletes indeed. Eddie decided to take over Ashfield instead and turn it into a focus for greyhound racing. He started the renaissance last June and by September, Ashfield was open. It took 200 tons of sand to sort out the track. Cables for the ill-fated underground heating had to be dug out of the ground. Cleaning up the terracing itself was of Soviet proportions. But it was done.

Today's Ashfield is perhaps a little basic and it is not exactly Ibrox or the Glasgow Concert Hall. But it is tidy and clean, and you will not slip into the mud and glaur which characterise many a football park or, indeed, the nearest dog track to Ashfield, which is out near Possil and Milton, the accredited National Greyhound Racing Association dog track, Shawfield.

Shawfield is a pleasant and rather raffish spot, and busy enough: I don't put it down at all. But new Ashfield is even better, though it is not entirely official. In fact it is, and nothing wrong with this, really a flapping track. That is to say that while other NGRA tracks like Shawfield have their own dogs the animals at Ashfield are privately-owned. But there is nothing wrong with the facilities for the dogs at Ashfield. It is the top independent track in the UK, and possesses a racing shed of more than 400 (number of dogs that is).

AT any one time the well-looked after Ashfield kennels can take 48 canines. Dog-owners pay #3 to enter their champions and win perhaps as much as 20 quid (though Ashfield is perhaps one of the strongest betting markets in Britain with as much as 10 grand and more being punted on the Monday and Friday nights when the races are on).

The dogs are well-looked after and weighed and the days of sticking pies, drugs, whisky and such unguents down their throats to distort a result are, well almost, over. The great thing about the dugs is that it is fair: everybody cheats and that's the fun of it.

Ashfield has been much cleaned up and the bar itself is a model of hospitality. In there, between races, I met a wheen of characters, every one of them with, extraordinarily, a good word to say for the new impresario of this Possil palace, Eddie Ramsay. Nae wonder. There are 16 of a staff getting wages and 20 overall. It keeps people in jobs.

Assistant manager Charlie Cawkwell told me that Ashfield hasn't just revitalised greyhound racing, but has done wonders for the local area too. ``Even the fitba' club,'' he said. ``We do their grasscutting for nothing and glad to.''

Yet it is not easy for the dog tracks. There is 4% excise duty paid on the drawings, regardless of whatever profit is made on the dogs. In a sport in which the participants have been, and remain, traditionally, people largely drawn from mining communities and areas of heavy industry in the Central Industrial Belt - those very areas where employment has been decimated or indeed wiped out - it is hard for the exercising of meagre pleasures to be sustained. But sustained it must be, just for the thrill of it. I lost, I like to think, my 10 quid with grace. At least I had a tenner.