Humphrey Appleby

Except that England started winning the Ashes once he returned. Surprised you had to look up Boycott - one of the greatest batsman of any era. All sorts of cliques and favouritism in England circles in that era, and Boycott was also unfairly criticised at times, even though his runs, average and strike rate speak for themselves.

What has changed in the UK in recent years, is the focus on elite sport. Huge amounts of money being targeted at sports which have been identified as 'gold mines' for British teams. However, England has consistently underachieved in its main sport of football (although winning the World U20 Cup went almost unnoticed), and whilst it's been more successful in cricket, it still hasn't really achieved as much as the law of averages amongst just 10 countries would suggest. In the meantime, the grassroots of these sports is largely dying on its a*se, whilst public money is channelled into encouraging participation in sports that will never be mass participation due to the equipment and facilities required. Of course, the public isn't really interested whilst British teams clean-up in the likes of Olympics in the targeted sports, but you have to wonder where things are going in mainstream sports, and indeed the future of the recreational side of things after youth level. Scotland has self-inflicted problems in its sport, especially football. Not enough competitive teams, an insufficiently competitive structure, and too many competing bodies running parallel competitions that have created stagnation and aren't ensuring resources are going to the right places.

Rider Control only aimed to equalise team strengths in the same league (and I think then only in the BL). It wouldn't really help with an Inter-League competition, and I don't think it's desirable for the appeal of such a competition for the higher league teams to be missing their best riders who're likely to be the main drawcards. Far better to utilise some sort of handicap system - either on track or through a points (dis)advantage - to make things more competitive.

Not sure - I remember some quite well attended 4TTs when it was a more prestigious NL competition, although I seem to remember that riders started to be allowed to miss these rounds and spectator interest dropped away. I can imagine though, the 4TTs weren't popular with promoters because of the same problem of having to finance three away meetings from only one revenue generating home meeting. You can make a reasonable 3TT format with 4 rider teams, but the biggest flaw is one team is always sitting out of each heat. That's especially boring for home meetings, and also makes things like tactical subs/rides impractical. 3TTs are okayish as a novelty format, but shouldn't be used for anything serious even though I believe the Danish Open League did use that format for a season or maybe two. There was a huge disparity between the BL and NL in those days, so any inter-league competition was never going to be highly competitive. Might be different today where the 'Premiership' and 'Championship' are closer in strength, plus you might consider things like points handicaps to give the lower league teams more of a chance.

A 4TT format would be more suited to an Inter-League Cup - more chance of the lower league teams being competitive with small-side teams, plus multiple teams per meeting would maintain some interest if 1 or 2 of the teams were not competitive. 4TTs are more suited to club-based competitions where there's only a few teams, and where you want to reduce the volunteer effort needed to stage meetings.

Well the negative is that 1 in 4 meetings rather than 1 in 2 will be revenue generating for each team, and that's a big inherent problem to overcome to start with. Plus you'll need to pay for at least 16 and possibly 20 riders (if you include reserves) at each meeting, rather than the 14 needed for matches now, so that's more travelling expenses. And if that's not enough, you can't make a decent heat formula in less than 16 heats, so that's at least one more heat to find points money for, before you even consider the reserves who'll otherwise be sitting around. I won't even get into the difficulties of scheduling 4TT fixtures to ensure that every team gets the same number of home meetings and meets every other team in the league an equal number of times. Or the excessive repetition it causes if you're able to achieve this. So sorry to be Mr Negative, but a 4TT structure isn't going to revolutionise the sport for all the reasons above. Might work for a short duration tournament that's primarily funded for television and sponsorship, but that isn't going to happen in the current climate. I wasn't asked to suggest something positive - I was commenting on why a 4TT format isn't the answer. The problems with speedway are far deeper rooted than the format of the meetings, and it's now so utterly undercapitalised that it's probably doomed. However, my view which I've expressed many times on here is that it needs to be cheaper and offer better value in terms of the number and speed of running the heats, and teams need to be made-up of riders that turn-up every week. Nevertheless, plenty disagree and believe the sport should bankrupt itself to attract back the mercenaries, organising meetings when it suits them rather than the spectators during the summer months. Plenty also think British-based riders should be off riding in mickey mouse competitions masquerading as continental championships in order that a handful of half-decent riders can be selected for other tournaments that also don't provide any financial benefits to anyone other private speculators. Until these underlying issues are addressed, tinkering with the format is just moving the deckchairs on the Titanic.

It's a non-starter for a professional league because promotions only receive revenue from home meetings, and 4TTs would mean that only 25% of meetings would be at home instead of 50%. Denmark did run their leagues on this basis in the past, but that was more a part-time competition, ran far fewer meetings, and their cost structure was and is different.

Utter rubbish. Ethnic Latvians are not even Slavic. The average Latvian has no love for the Russians at all, who they consider invaded and occupied their country. The difference in speedway is that Daugavpils is a largely Russian city.

Unnecessarily cancelling a practice session is disgraceful and is why British speedway continues to be a joke. If that had happened to me, I'd havrjust walked away from the sport.

Every sport should define their own policies, as each have different circumstances. Cricket by necessity has needed more flexibility than some sports because it's primarily a Commonwealth-based sport and there are so many dual nationals, plus the fact there's a distinct two-tier system in terms of test/ODI cricket and other levels. Then you have situations like the West Indies where there's no common nationality, and indeed some of the member islands are even British (and Dutch). Citizenship and accidents of birth are really a poor test of nationality these days though. It should really be based on where you spent your formative years and developed your sporting skills.

What if these riders have dual citizenship? A more-and-more frequent occurrence these days. Bruce Grobbelaar never played for England as far as I know, and he was actually born a South African not a Rhodesian/Zimbabwean.

The audited circulation was about 12,000 a few years ago. If I remember, Philippe subsequently told us that didn't include subscription copies, and total circulation was around 18,000. Since then, he's mentioned it's dropped a lot lower. I'm just stating what facts I remember - not making comment on them.

It's a nice story, but even cursory investigation of the facts would reveal it's total cobblers. The meeting you're referring to must have been in 1995, but Wiggy was certainly still riding on a Dutch licence around 1997 and 1998 time. I know because one of conditions of being granted the licence was to ride in two Dutch meetings per year (according to my Dutch friend whose parents organised the speedway and grasstrack meetings at the time), and I remember him riding in meetings I was actually present at when I was living there. DutchGrasstrack might even remember the Dutch meetings he rode in. [i'm also remembering your mate Armando rode in the Dutch Championship on a Dutch licence around the same time too.] Wiggy if I recall, took out a Dutch license over a disagreement about having to ride in the British Grasstrack Masters in order to obtain an international licence from the ACU. I seem to remember he claimed it was a restrictive and illegal practice, and was eventually proved correct. Given that he must have retired around 1999 time, I'd be interested to know if he ever actually rode on a British licence again.

If a national federation says a particular meeting or series of meetings is a national championship, then obviously that's what it is and they can define who's eligible to compete. If however said national federation decided it needed foreign riders to make up the numbers or provide a draw card in a weak field, how on earth can the FIM intervene? If the FIM tells the federation they can't use certain riders, then said national federation can just reclassify the meeting or call it something else, but still achieve the same outcome. It's not that a national championship is a requirement for qualifying riders to FIM competitions. [And incidentally I had a similar sort of issue with the MSA and used a similar workaround.] I'm actually not disagreeing with the premise that a national championship should be for local riders, but I'm also sympathetic to the fact some countries don't have enough (good) riders for one, and the situation is now much more complex with more dual nationalities and more competitor mobility than in the past. And the British Championship has also been run into the ground over the past 25 years, and neither the BSPA nor many riders seem much interested in it these days.

Philippe an investigative journalist? ROFL Then why complain to the FIM? They have nothing to do with who can or can't ride in a domestic meeting, regardless of the label on it. It's the ACU/SCB/BSPA who are responsible for creating and recognising national championships in their jurisdictions, and presumably the eligibility for them.

Frankly, I'd have thought there were more pressing issues in speedway to be worrying about. Foreign riders in national championships has been happening for years, and usually comes down to the number and quality of local riders in a particular country. Unless it's an FIM championship, it should be down to the speedway authorities in each country to decide who qualifies or is invited to participate in meetings under their jurisdiction. For that matter, how would you actually define the whether a meeting is a national championship or not? #notthoughtthroughproperly Why are you suddenly worrying about the British Championship now anyway? It's become a declining spectacle for years, with riders hardly bothered to turn up, and yet I don't remember seeing many editorials decrying the situation.

Remember chatting to him on top of the clubhouse at Elgane. IMO, he was also the best writer in the Speedway Star, and was always worth reading.

My understanding is that BSI have to organise a certain number of GPs each year, so presumably they need to find some cheap venues to fulfil their obligations. It's all very well saying GPs should be held in country XYZ, but it largely comes down to who's prepared to pay for them, which is obviously why there's 3 in Poland. The Welsh government provides a significant grant in order to bring the British GP to Cardiff, and presumably the Copenhagen GP was dropped because its local authority was no longer interested in sponsoring. Similarly, the Stockholm local authority or tourist board is absent from the current list of sponsors, and it's surely no coincidence that there's talk of dropping that venue as well. Melbourne would originally seem to have been a mates agreement, but with stadium ownership having passed to the AFL and crowds down after a reasonably good first year, one wonders whether that'll be a reasonable excuse to quietly drop that one too. Russia is most likely not on the calendar because they're not prepared to pay the asking price, plus there's all the attendant difficulties of dealing with the logistics in Russia unless you have the right 'fixer'.

Not sure those conclusions can be drawn. Would the local fans who go to the German, Czech and Slovenian GPs for example, travel somewhere else if there was no GP in their country? In British speedway when tracks close, some might start following a neighbouring track but I think most are just lost to the sport.

When there were only 6 GPs they still didn't fill the venues.

They can't fill the quality venues as it is, so what would change by reducing the number of meetings?

Track preparation aside, Krsko isn't the worst venue although it's not really a prime tourist destination. The apparent lack of oversight that causes these sorts of recurring issues at what's supposed to be the sport's premier event, is arguably more of a concern than where this GP was held. As for sponsors, they seem to be relegated to a footnote on the SGP website this season...

I'm sure lessons will be learned...

I've got some correspondence from him on this subject, and whilst I don't have it immediately to hand, my recollection was he considered keeping matches close more important than 'fairness', especially for away teams. It also keep fans involved in the meeting through speculation of what changes might be made, although I think there was acknowledgement the rule tended to favour top heavy teams which was apparently a bugbear of Len Silver in particular. However, he certainly seemed to favour some sort of tactical option, although stated a preference for tactical subs over double points. I can well imagine that the tactical sub rule had a bigger impact on results than tactical rides because you could bring in a better rider in place of another at any time (if 6 points down of course) whereas you have to rely on the heat formula falling your way with the tactical ride. In most circumstances you'd want to have your best or at least second best rider taking the tactical ride, but they're not necessarily going to be programmed in the next heat. This said, a tactical substitute still has to score points the same way as everyone else, so I think ultimately has more credibility than double points. For me, I think tactical substitutes should only be allowed when a team is at least 8 points down as there's too much advantage when only 6 behind, but I don't have any problem with the basic premise.

He approached me quite some years ago for some reference information, around the time he was thinking about writing his first book. After that we interacted for some years, until one day I received an abrupt and close to abusive email. To this day, I've no idea what prompted it as it was certainly nothing I'd said to or about him, although it seems to have been a familiar pattern from what others have told me, plus what you can read in his books. This does not change the fact that he had some very good ideas about how to run speedway, and in fact sport in general. Views that I happen to mostly agree with, but it's one thing to believe in a certain way of doing things, but another to be able to persuade everyone over to your viewpoint and then keep them convinced. And that isn't going to happen if you're falling out with your constituents over trivial things. I did ask him whether he thought he could turn British speedway around (and bear in mind this was over a decade ago), but I think he felt it was on an irrevocable decline regardless of what was done. Maybe had things been done differently in the 1980s, but of course he had the sense to get out of the business then.