4thbender

You'd have to have a heart of stone to ban a guy for attending to the needs of a sick child.

Nice to see young Cairns winning his first ever race at PL level. That'll be something he always remembers.

Has Luke Harison been snapped up by any PL team as a "Rising Star"? Assuming Leon is still not fit for Thursday's match, Luke could be the man. He scored 8+1 for KL yesterday, outscoring Lawson, Harris, Iversen, Kvech and Cook in the process.

I'd go one further and say that the premiership title is bound for Leicester this year. It's the "Kyle Howarth effect": (wherever he goes he ends up on the winners' rostrum).

A couple of weeks? Do you have that in writing?

On Sunday Will Cairns will celebrate his 16th birthday. Does that mean he'll be eligible to become a "Rising Star"?... 'cos Sheffield need one!

Can anyone explain why Leicester have suddenly become Sheffield's "bogey team"? We've beaten all the lower order teams home and away this season and come very close at BV and Ippo, but the only team to give us a real good hiding is Leicester. With a weakened team I'm feeling very apprehensive about tonight's outcome and no other team has made me feel that way this season.

Update on Tai:

Really? That one slipped my attention.

I don't think so, but on 28 March 2007 you did have the pleasure of reducing Sheffield to the ignominy of a 75-15 (yes, that's right: 15 x 5-1's!) at KL in the Premier Trophy. If I'm not mistaken, that's the only time it's ever been done by any team in any competition. Andre Compton blamed the track; after going headlong into the fence in Heat 1 he said that he just couldn't get his bike to turn on the slippery surface!

Luke Becker and Josh Pickering are the latest PL riders to be sidelined through "crashes in Poland". Seems to me there is a great temptation for PL riders to make the weekly Sunday schlep to collect their share of the Polish Zloty on offer, but an unwelcome number are failing to return 'in one piece'. Poland seems to bear a disproportionate responsibility for the decimation of available PL talent.

Yeah, Sheffield really do badly at Foxhall... wait a minute....the last time we came there (Monday, August 19, 2024), Sheffield beat you by 38 - 52!

How many points do they get for a "moral" victory? As for the Tigers heat leaders' colours being lowered, they scored 29+2 whilst Ippo's scored 23+2.... or was there an additional six "moral" points scored that nobody noticed?

Lucky win for Sheffield. We appear to now have a third heat-leader issue. CH is now clearly in his dotage and is nothing more than a 6.0-point rider living on his reputation and memories of past glories. To have any hope of becoming champions we need much more from Kerr and Sedgmen, which we are just not getting. Having said all that, Ippo have a similar problem: Doyle and Sayfudtinov are not the feared pairing they once were, and problems will only increase as age takes its inevitable toll. They've been lucky with the form of Thompson, who had an off-night at Owlerton. These two teams - allegedly favourites for the PL title - are interesting from a management point of view. Much will depend on the actions taken to plug the gaps as their issues escalate later in the season.

Leon Flint must be one of the most improved riders in the PL. I think he's surprised everyone with his early season form.

I'm on record as having predicted great stardom for young Cairns after his appearance at Owlerton at the back end of 2024. If anyone is thinking of sloping off after the PL action I would strongly recommend you stick around for a while to take a look at this lad; he's still at school but he's dynamite.

Not as daft as it seems?...No, it's dafter. For a start, how would you define a "dialled in" home rider, and who would be responsible for nominating who gets handicapped and who doesn't?

Why not handicap riders with weights strung to their backs like they do the horses?

Sorry to hear you won't be with us next week ...(honest!) Speedway can do without fair-weather friends who turn up just to slag-off the racing, the track, the riders, the management, and the fans. If you don't like it, go and pay sixty quid to watch a bunch of multi-millionaire fancy-dans kicking a bag of wind.... or you could pay a bit less and watch the women's version (nicer legs!) However, I must correct you on certain matters about track safety (I've said this till I'm blue in the face), but ALL the injuries sustained by Sheffield riders in recent seasons have been sustained on tracks elsewhere. These alleged injuries sustained at Owlerton last year are figments of people's wildest imagination. There was a single unfortunate incident suffered by Ben Cook who came a cropper on bend 2. He was knocked out cold but was riding again within ten days! To find a serious career-changing injury occurring at Owlerton you must go back to 2014, when Taylor Poole suffered a fractured femur which put a premature end to a promising career. I can therefore say without fear of contradiction that Sheffield has one of the cleanest safety records in speedway.

You sure about this?

We're doing it for Tai. If Ipswich think they've got the Premiership title all sown up, they need to think again. There are more teams that will receive a mauling from a Sheffield team in this mood. Even from his hospital bed, Tai is having an influence beyond all expectations.... and what a captain we've found!

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If Sheffield was that bad a track, I'm sure we'd see lots of Sheffield riders sidelined through injury. Like, for example, the end of the '23 season, when Tigers had to field 3 guest riders for the final, with Woofinden, Gilkes, Vissing and Jack Holder on the injury list. Or the '24 season, when Woofinden (again) was an absentee for half the season. The odd thing is, despite riding the Owlerton track week in and week out, NONE of them were injured at Sheffield... they ALL succombed to injuries elsewhere! As I've pointed out before, you have to go back to 2014 to find a Sheffield rider suffering serious injury on the (allegedly) "perilous" Owlerton track. It can't be that bad!

Getting a bit fed up now with the groundless insinuations about the Owlerton track being a danger. All speedway tracks have their moments of horror, but Owlerton is no worse than any other. This myth seems to have kicked off because Ben Cook had a shocker on bend two which knocked him senseless. But, to be fair, he was racing again ten days later. The only other accident of note at Sheffield during the 2024 season was the one which finished Emil Sayfutdinov's season, which occurred NOT on the allegedly "notorious" bend two, but on bend four, and was put down to Emil's over-exuberance to catch the race-leader (i.e. his own fault, rather than any fault of the track). Every venue has its share of bangs and scrapes every season, but nine times out of ten, riders get up and walk away, albeit licking their wounds rather gingerly. But for the record, the last time the Sheffield track saw a rider incur "life-changing" injuries was 2014, when Taylor Poole fractured a femur, causing him to draw a premature veil over his racing career (and that wasn't on bend two either). Speedway can be a dangerous sport at any venue and all tracks make every effort to ensure that rider safety is the paramount consideration. The problem is not helped by alarmist voices making baseless "wall of death" insinuations.

Steady as Bob Cratchit, Kyle as the Ghost of Christmas Past and Kith Chapman as the fat turkey?