topsoil

Good luck with that. Take away all the riders who currently ride in Poland and see what you are left with. And even better luck trying to spread the riders left around enough clubs to make a league.

Foggy, overcast, but dry. No rain in Berwick since dinner time.

Is it really that much of a hardship? The lineups are announced during the parade and the riders announced before every heat. It's not like they are keeping anybody in the dark.

Programmes are free with season tickets

Good first meeting, for an individual. Track was nice and smooth, with a bit of dirt round the banking after a few races. Inside line got used to good effect on the third / fourth bends early on. Some impressive rides by Doolan, Spud, Leon and Coty at different times in the meeting. Theo Pijper surely won't take long to get a team spot somewhere. Jye did really well to stay on after his coming together with Nico Covatti, looked destined for the safety fence. Likes the new system with the season pass, no queueing, straight in. Meeting went at a decent pace. Only down side was the injury to Danny Ayres. It's good to be back.

I got on really well with Peter and still do, every time he is back and we bump into each other, we speak for ages. It seems you have a grief with someone?

Peter Waite also created some god damn awful tracks. He created them for a specific type of rider, if you liked it, you thrived, but several didn't like it and the sight of riders two wheeling into corners turned a lot of fans way. It was the days where Berwick had a huge home track advantage and on this basis had some good league finishes. Funny that Peter got a lot of criticism back in the day but fans now look back all misty eyed on his time in charge.

every cloud.....

These days the sport would be ridiculed for this, "how can the sport be taken seriously?". Ah, the good old days :-)

It is if it comes from you :-)

Looks like another average day on whining on the forum then? Standard

I've never been able to understand this theory that everything was better in the old days. You can look back to a lot of results in the 70s and 80s and see absolute hammerings. Imagine how those type of results would be treated on this forum nowadays. The "second halves", I can remember a lot of the time riders didn't fancy it and either went through the motions, or were replaced by local juniors because of bike problems. I bet the forum members would love that these days. The good old days when riders were part timers, travelling about with the one bike on the back of a car. What if that bike got damaged in a crash or blew an engine? You either had to borrow another bike or withdrew from the meeting. You can imagine that going down well these days. You look back at the race time back then, I will use my own club Berwick as an example. Race times in the 70s and 80s are roughly the same as a Northern Junior League race now. Can you imagine many fans nowadays putting up with that as a night's entertainment. Yes it would be great if we could get back to a time where we had the top riders in the world competing in our leagues, but unless we can find some rich benefactors or miraculously find some big sponsorship or TV money, we have to accept this isn't going to happen. Let's face it, we were all a lot more easily pleased in the past. There were fewer alternatives, we were less coddled in those days. Now we want instant gratification and we want it all the time. For my opinion, speedway is better now than it ever has been, throughout the sport. More riders are becoming "professional", the standard of riders have gone up as a whole, right across the sport. But all I see on the forum is doom and gloom. I find I spend very little time looking at the forum these days, the general mood starts to bring me down.

Didn't realise Berwick had signed him. Know he's a local lad obviously, but was considering him an Edinburgh rider. Makes sense to sign as many assets as you can, the loan fees come in handy.

He's the only possible starter Berwick could have in it

There is no doubt there is a lot to admire about the Isle of Wight club and the way it is run, growing the fan base, giving novices a first taste of riding a bike, the entertainment they provide at a meeting being a few examples, but to say Barry Bishop should be in charge of British Speedway is a big leap. For instance, how would he deal with the problem of riders giving preference to the more lucrative leagues in Poland / Sweden, how would he deal with doubling up / down, fixed nights, all problems at the top end of the sport, which fans of the sport continually complain about, which he has no experience of. My thoughts is that he would end up as powerless as everybody else in that position.

Why does the question remain? There is no question, as Craig Cook has done nothing. It's all hypothetical. Based on hypotheses, you can ask any question you like, but it has no relevance. Time to move on.

Football crowds published include season ticket holders (who may or may not be there), complimentary tickets given to players and officials (which may or may not be used), press passes (which may or may not be used) and those in hospitality (may be indoors or behind glass). So just because the published crowd is 901, that doesn't mean to say there was 901 people there.

Surely not on this forum? Don't you just hate it when the truth comes out? Rumours, half-truths, fake news and Chinese whispers are far more fun.

are you going to flash your cash and go this season?

Workington withdrew from the league on 14 January. You really think if Glasgow were that desperate to sign Kyle Bickley they would have waited six weeks to do it? As with most things in life there will be more to the story than meets the eye, only those involved will know the actual truth, the rest of us on the forum will make our own mind up as to what happened, based on how it fits our argument.

Considering who this comes from it is either the biggest compliment or insult you can think of :-)

Nice bonus to have the Bordernapolis included in the season ticket price. Promotion should be congratulated on that. They could easily have taken the "not our fault" attitude to fans losing a couple of fixtures from the ticket.

In an ideal world we would see weekly fixtures, I would like to see a meeting every week as well, but fans in this day and age have proved they are not interested in challenge matches or individual meetings, these meetings just do not pay. So league meetings it has to be and unfortunately the number of teams have diminished.

The Championship is on it's arse with 10 home meetings, but the Polish Ekstraliga, the league everybody looks up to, has only 7? The moral of the story? Make the most of the fixtures you have.

surely after 50+ years they are allowed to put the prices up?