E I Addio

It's not a question of whose fault it is, it's a matter of what are the consequeces. The consequences of a team being cast adrift in March with no hope of building a decent team, are that attendances which are barely sustainable at present will suffer further and the risk of closure arises. That is the point SCB was driving at. My goodness, there are some blinkered thickos on the South Coast but you take the biscuit. No Speedwáy fan with an element of decency about him wants to see fellow fans watching a rubbish team getting beat every week,even if if idiots like you think it's funny.

Sid, the rules have not been published yet. What we have at the moment is the SCB announcement summarising what was agreed. That summary has still to be distilled into specific rules which will be included in the rule book when it is released. The problem is that most people seem to have not bothered to read the SCB announcement and the comment on the Swindon website is at odds with what the SCB announcement says, hence people are getting confused and moaning about it when it's there own fault for not reading the SCB announcement.

Not surprised it caused a falling out. Naughty Rosco, pinching Matts stunts !

I keep telling stevebrum that KK is on his way to Wolves but he doesn't believe me

Kasprzak

It's like Russian roulette, with everyone hoping someone else gets Kasprzak !

For one thing 4.89 is not Adams PL average. According to the Poole website it is his (unofficial) EL average. More to the point the SCB Announcement issued after the AGM specifically says Tier 1 riders get a converted PL average. If Tier 2 rider get a converted PL average then presumably the announcement would have said so instead of mentioning only Tier 1. So, back to square one: how is it that Starke gets a convertedPL average unless he is Tier1in which case he wouldn't be at Poole anyway. Has there been a formal announcement that Tier 2 riders get a converted PL average (nd I don't think there has) or is this just another one of the forums urban myths with no factual basis ?

Serious question: why would Ellis be on a 3 and not Starke, unless Starke is now in the top tier ? If Ellis, who according to the Poole website has an average of 4.89 comes in on a 3 surely all tier 2 riders would also be on a 3 ?

The last sentence is something that could be said about most teams at the start of every season but the landscape changes enormously by play off time. Who would have though last March that Kings Lynn who looked so strong then finish up,missing the play offs by a mile. Who would have thought that Coventry who seemed so much in the driving seat to top the league would have gone out with such a whimper. Then look at Swindons roller coaster of a season. The first priority IMO is to win at least 13 home meetings then it only needs to pick up a few points away to make the PO's. After that anything can happen . Like most clubs in most years it depends largely on everyone staying fit.

I know you made the point elsewhere about on conversion from their draft averages and you were right about it IMO . My point is that once you move away from conversion from draft averages you open the door to all kinds of inconsistencies and that is exactly what has happened. The whole matter of protected assets is one of the things that mess up the draft. Let's not be specific about Poole then. Protected assets mean that any club whose protected asset does well at reserve can keep getting him back and so have the top scoring reserve year on year. It would be the same for Coventry if Garrity had decided to have another year as EDR instead of standing his ground and going into the 1-5. The protected asset system is good for the clubs that own that asset but no good for the sport when the fans can fill their programmes in for the protected heats before the race even starts season after season It reduces the relevance of the league as serious competition. Secondly if the whole point of EDR is to give more experience to riders then surely it is beneficial to the riders themselves to have a season at somewhere other than their home track.

So Howarth and Newman both have higher EL averages than PL but Howarth rides on his higher average but Newman rides on the lower average ? So which one does Auty ride on ? I think we ought to wait for the starting averages to be confirmed before looking at this further because until then we wont know for surer, but one thing that seems to be coming increasingly clear is that this whole mess has kicked off because Poole were allowed to fiddle it to get Newman back/ THe one thing that 98% of us probably agree on is that the fairest way and most logical way to do it is that the team that finishes bottom gets first pick and the team that finishes top gets last pick. Once you start tampering/fiddling /adjusting that arrangement its sets up a domino effect that is liable to create all kinds of inconsistencies and at the end of the day that seems to be what is happening ..

The problem is not clubs that use the rules its a club that breaks them.

Is it any different with Howarth ? You can't compare PL averages with EL but they are still putting riders in on converted PL averages, hence Newman finishes up half way down the list he should have been top of.

So let's get this right. Adam Ellis gets a higher average at reserve for Lakeside than Rob Mear, goes to Poole on a 3 point average as an EDR rider and nothing is said. Rob Mear goes to Lakeside on a 3 and suddenly it's all wrong. Apart from the fact that Mear had an official GSA and no GSA's were kept in Adams year at reserve, there is no difference. Both are being rounded down to three for team building purposes. It's not as though Mear was a special case. For whatever reason it has been decided that they all start on a 3 and as long as it's the same for everyone I don't see it as a major issue.

I guess he is just too dim to realise the irony of the at last sentence.

First of all, I don't want Dave Watt back. I thought he was excellent in 2013 and had some brilliant Heat 15s with PK in last heat decides, but that was probably the high water mark of his career , but times move on and the balance of the team is different now. Kim has been an asset for 6 years but he hasn't been a Hammer all that time. He has increased his starting average every year he rode as a Hammer. As for being a heatleader, in the first 6 home meetings of 2015 he recorded 4 wins and 2 seconds, in heat 1 racing against the opposing No1. AJ didn't win any of them and plenty of other No1s didn't manage anything like that. Matej Zagar certainly didn't, so I think Kim is under rated even though inconsistent away. The fact remains that Lakeside's 1-5 were averaging almost the same as Coventry and more than Kings Lynn so they weren't doing that bad a job despite a few howlers on the road. Harsh on Bech it may be, but he was employed as second heatleader and didn't quite deliver. He wouldn't have lasted half a season at Poole. Ed Kennett impressed a lot of home fans. He was not voted rider of the year for no reason. Some of his passes were absolutely top drawer and it would be madness to get rid of someone who gets punters through the turnstiles even if his away form has room for improvement. So to strengthen up either Mikkel or Richard need to be moved. We are still stuck with the matter of who realistically is available to do the job. Batch would probably be the best of a poor bunch but I suspect he could be at Kings Lynn.

It looks fairly certain that Bech won't be back. He is the only one of last seasons 1-5 that has not been offered a contract for next year. At his best he was quite outstanding but for every good meeting there were 3 or 4 not so good ones. He has had two seasons at Lakeside but to be brutally honest he is no further forward towards a heatleader role than he was two years ago and finished the season at No2. His average was under 6 before he dropped to second string. There seem to be worries that he is not a team man (few Danes are). I would like to see him back if he fulfills his potential but the home fans are not going to cut him any more slack if he were to come back and still not cut the mustard as a heat-leader I don't think MJJ wants to ride over here, but even if he did he hasn't exactly established a good record for reliability in this country. As for North, he is not good enough to fill the second heatleader role even in a weakened league. If he was that good Poole would have kept him. Jon Cook and Neil Vatcher have. both acknowledged that Lakeside's immediate need is for a rider who can constantly support AJ in the big heats, 13 and 15. The the pattern of Lakeside's scoring in probabably 75 % of last seasons matches was that they would be doing pretty well to around heat 10 nd then fade. The problem is that of the riders likely to ride in the UK next year, very,very few of them are good enough to fill the role Lakeside want filled. I suppose that goes for several other clubs as well.

I agree the BSPA are don't exactly have an enviable record of issuing clear and unambiguous press releases. I have done my best to interpret (guess) what I think they mean, but wouldn't stake my life on being 100% right about it! I think a little help from the Plain English Society in preparing their press releases would be beneficial ! P.S. Word on the streets is that Wolves are having talks with KK. No wind up.

Strange, the Poole website says Bucowski is a Peterborough asset. Still, I guess you know best

As usual with this sort of discussion where we try to dig out the facts we invariably get the idiotic element that can't be bothered to read things for themselves and simply want to mudsling. As I have said many times the sport has enough problems without people making more up as per the above post. The rules published are NOT open to all kinds of interpretation. Why not ? BECAUSE NO RULES HAVE YET BEEN PUBLISHED. I wish people would try to get their minds round that simple concept, as a first point. Secondly, for those of us that have bothered to read the SCB announcement its intention is quite clear. It says Summary of AGM in brief. I presume most people understand what a summary is and what in brief means. The discrepancy arises when we get to the Speedwáy Star interpretation of it. Now , it wouldn't be the first time that Speedwáy Star has got something wrong, in which case the criticism needs to be aimed at them, not the BSPA, but we don't know if that is the case at the moment. It will become clearer with time, but in the. Meantime spare us the usual old rhetoric about rule manipulation when as yet there are no rules (and the season is still 4 months away) Why do you presume Lakeside have two T1 riders? That could only happen if the T1 riders are not picke d and drop into T2 In which case they become T2 riders.

Where does that information come from? I have just looked at the report in Speedwáy Star of 24th Oct and that doesn't fit exactly with what was said in the SCB statement but neither are crystal clear, which is a rather familiar situation with SCB press releases, so I suppose we can't be sure until the rules and/or the averages are published. However, as far as Rob Mear is concerned it would be incongruous if he came in on a 4.09'aversge from the second tier while Lewis Blackbird was only on a 3.7 from the first tier, so it is a little confusing . That assumes your information about Josh Bates is correct though which is why I asked. Going strictly by the SCB statement and nothing else it looks like all the second tier riders come in on a 3 and stay at reserve, it's only when you read the SS report carefully that it seems to say that they all get converted averages and can all move into the 1-5, so who knows?

Correct me if I am wrong. I am looking at the BSPA announcement after the first part of the AGM in October, posted on the Lakeside website 19th Oct. It says the draft system will be retained, then mentions modifications to Tier 1, I.e. They come in on a converted PL average and get an EL average after 4 meetings. Nothing is mentioned about Tier 2 so we assume no change, unless there is a subsequent announcement that I have missed. In relation to SCB's point about Mear having a 4+ EL average the fact is that even in the top tier the average is converted from the PL and Rob doesn't have a PL average, so we still come back to an assessed average.

BSPA announcement. Only Tier one riders start on a converted PL average and move into the 1-5. Nothing mentioned about tier 2 having converted PL averages or going into the 1-5.

Second Tier EDR rider comes in on assessed 3 and stays at reserve all season. Thems the rules !

That depends on the interpretation of "new" riders. They have all been here before and have averages.