George Dodds

yup academy meeting in the bar on sat 3 (no meeting on track), Somerset on track on Monday 5

If you're asking me if the toughest sell is to persuade people that £15 for a couple of hours at the speedway is good value for money in a town where wages are low and disposable income tight then I would agree. Where I work they would expect a couple of hours solid drinking and a bag of chips (coz they're classy like) for the cost of 15 heats of speedway. Before you counter with football - well 90 minutes action against 22 minutes speaks for itself.

Really? Sure you're not just making some of this up and that both the things highlighted already happen? As for having no alternative sports to compete with - have you ever been at Berwick station when Newcastle United are at home and seen how many people leave town to watch their sport. Leaflets/posters are displayed in between 70 and 100 pubs and local businesses in the town. No-one is saying that there isn't more that can be done, to say nothing is happening is, to say the least, untrue.

thnxalit !!

children have found a way around the moron filter?

Sports that receive major government funding - either directly through Sport England/Scotland/NI etc or the lottery - have to adhere to strict testing procedures which can include having to let testers know where you will be at a given time on any given day. Failure to be there is seen as refusing a test, that's what got the cyclist Lizzie Armistead in trouble before the Olympics. Obviously that doesn't apply to speedway so I would think that random testing would suffice - it's what happens in rugby, football and motor racing already. Anyone daft enough to be using recreational drugs has been warned so anyone caught is an idiot and deserves any ban they get.

.. nope searched Websters and OED and still not found discluded

.. but as a "legal high" it isn't a banned drug. However, cough mixture, hayfever remedies, health supplements, certain painkillers, ginseng tea and the like - all available over the counter - contain the sort of thing that can get you in trouble with drugs testers. I'm sure a couple of riders might fall foul but can't subscribe to the "I know they're all at it" conspiracy theory - but where would the BSF be without conspiracy theorists!

So much easier to understand when a poster uses real words!

Can anyone provide an English translation?

perhaps artificial grass doesn't count

amen brother

fans ... have you ever met a two-eyed one?

I agree ... the past was monumentally boring - much like those interminably stuck in it. Here's to the future, soon to be the past. The weekend is a brave attempt to try something different. I doubt it will pass without mishap and disappointment for some but that is no reason not to try at all.

Super League doesn't relegate teams. It was a closed shop for over 10 years, teams having to apply for franchises every three years, and last year introduced the Super 8s whereby the bottom four teams in superleague and the top four in the championship played each other home and away with the top four earning a place in the following year's Superleague. Of course the four Superleague clubs all retained their places not least because their Salary Cap (the level of spending allowed for player wages) is almost double that of those in the Championship. Rugby League has a lot in common with speedway - most of its club are financial basketcases and many fans have a rose tinted view of a past world which never actually existed

Is he actually being blocked from riding in the National League or is it that his average was too high for Birmingham? (Not being argumentative, I genuinely can't remember)

Hate to say it but one World title was sparse return for the talent that was Peter Collins (although I accept he won gold medals by the bucket-load in every other world event and longtrack) and, for almost diametrically opposite reasons, then there was Michael Lee ...

The BSPA should stick to the rule book - the paying public tend to want "special dispensation" when it suits their team and "rules are rules" when it benefits opponents.

Perhaps they should stick to hacking the phones of micro celebrities and inventing stories about Princess Diana's death - not surprised Gustix feels so comfortable in their company.

Sometimes speedway's goings-on can leave you cold then something like this reminds you of how good it and those that support it can be.

At least 20 years too late I fear

As long as it is enough to pay its way - that is all that matters. Some people are obsessed with crowd figures but unless you know the whole picture about rent, riders' wages, sponsorship and commercial income then it gives no real idea about the viability of a club. At some clubs 50 people through the turnstiles brings the same income as 10 people in corporate hospitality.

Might have been a minor one but I'm fairly certain that in the wake of the Hillsborough disaster it became demanded practice that police and match controllers knew exactly how many people had passed through the turnstiles into each section of a ground. I think whether attendances were printed or not depended on the value attached to them by individual papers. Up until the 1960s many Lancashire newspapers not only published attendances for league cricket matches but the actual gate receipts in pounds/shillings and pence!

Perhaps they should drag caravans behind then, aping (how appropriate) the class shown by your beloved stock car promotions

So you believe that HMRC bases its VAT demands from promotions on what they read on forums and in newspapers rather than demand a blizzard of paperwork and audited revenue returns? Only football publishes attendances as a matter of course and that is because national newspapers demand them .. but don't let that spoil your little conspiracy theory.