PHILIPRISING

I DID say many and certainly not all and often with good reason... your manufacturing industry, especially cars and white goods, leaders of Europe and without whom the whole EU would collapse overnight, etc, etc. Perhaps it is confidence rather than arrogance...

AND they are our ancestral cousins, fought alongside Great Britain in wars, so on and so on. Sad that some of here are so petty to suggest that they are bad for British speedway. Don't think that is the majority view. Just my opinion.

IF you can put with the seemingly endless adverts ... much worse than Sky for example.

THINK you are missing the point (no pun intended) and no its not ...

DEPENDS what those wages are. As I have previously argued here or elsewhere, scrap averages and wages could come down if you have 10 riders available for a team place rather than just one whose average happens to fill the void.

AND how would that help?

TRACKS will spend the same amount of money

HYPOTHETICALLY, if Leicester finish bottom of the PL, but don't wish to drop down, and Edinburgh top the CL but don't wish to go up, what do you think will happen?

DO seriously think there will be promotion and relegation?

HEAR, hear ...

QUITE right and another reason why averages don't work in any shape or form. Instead of selecting someone to work for you (ride) from a bunch of candidates, there might only be one whose average fits. Automatically his wage demands rocket. A five or six point rider can (and often do) finish up on a higher wage scale that a rider with a better average.

BLOODY hell, I agree with most of that. Going for a lay down...

YOU simply cannot compare speedway with any other team sport, not even cricket where play is conducted by one individual at a time ... bowler or batsman. Swindon fans no doubt would not be happy replacing Doyle or Wolves with Lindgren by using a junior rider. The disparity in ability is too great. To use cricket again, counties have huge squads of players and there is not a massive difference in the ability of all of them.

ONLY a small percentage would do 50 even if they remained fit throughout the season.

OUT of interest, how did you come up with the figure of 50?

WHAT you say makes sense, although none of us know how many fans are actually being lost and for what reason each week (my own feeling is lack of continuity of fixtures and teams is the biggest reason) but many insist that there would not be enough riders currently in the top 5 of one track to fill all the places in an 18 or even 19 (Lakeside) set-up. Guests or doubling up, if you had to have one which one would it be?

LOOK, I'm no fan of doubling up either but the bread and butter riders cannot make ends meet without it and, for example, do the fans of Swindon and Berwick care in Nick Morris rides for two teams as long as he doesn't miss any of their own fixtures? I hate the very thought of guests, etc but sometimes we have to face reality. Out of interest, if you had to get rid of either guests or doubling up which would you choose?

THINK it is more of an aspiration than intention right now. Few things still have to fall into place regarding the land on which the stadium is sited. But, hopefully, that will be the case. Still rumours that Ipswich and Sheffield will follow suit.

HOW would that work. The simple fact is that riders like Chris Harris, Danny King, etc need as many fixtures as possible to make ends meet and as undesirable as riders doubling up may be, and personally I don't like it, like guests its has been allowed to evolve into a necessary evil. Costs for riders are not going down. Engines, maintenance, fuel, vans, insurance, all apart from their own day-to-day living expenses, eat away at their income which is hardly on the scale of most professional sportsmen, most of whom do not have to fund their own equipment. It has become a vicious circle but at least if the PL races on two nights and the CL on the other five most if not all of the situations where two tracks want use of the same rider on the same night will be eradicated. If, as a by-product, some foreign riders, not necessarily from the top echelon, are available and at a cost a British track believes fits into its budget, then so much the better.

SPOT on ...

ONCE again, quite deliberately I would imagine, you distort what I have said. I am not campaigning for anyone on the subject of set race nights. It has been proposed by certain members of the BSPA including the vice-chairman as a means of allowing riders to double up riding for both PL and CL tracks without causing the fixture chaos that is now prevalent. Would I like to see Doyle and Holder racing in the UK next year? Yes, along with any rider currently not employed here whether they be Australian or any other nationality including German.

THE more people 'inside' speedway that I talk to the more I think doubling up will remain. The BSPA opened the flood gates and now cannot close them.

ONLY Premiership tracks on a Monday

THE BSPA divvy the money up between the tracks and they spend it on riders' wages ... just like Premiership football only on a much, much smaller scale.

TWO days for the PL and the other FIVE for the CL