E I Addio

Its not Lakeside.

Looking at Richie guesting for Leicester tonight he is far too good for EDR. He needs to be in an EL 1-5 to improve. Hopefully he will get a full EL place next year which is where he needs to be , not stuck in protected heats.

He scored 0,0,1,0 last time. He seems to be one of those benefitting by the EDR. Scheme so it will be interesting to see how he goes tomorrow.

Yes, having a howler on a wet track, but last time Wolves were down he scored ( from memory) about 13 and beat Jason Doyle in heat 13, so really riders of that level and that age a shouldn't really be in protected heats against NL riders . I would say Steve Worrall should be about the top end of the top tier and the rest are good enough to to be making their own way otherwise the disparity between the best and worst is too great. Hence, as people have already said we have a situation in which Lakeside's 1-5 have averaged pretty much the same as Coventrys but one is top the other is bottom mainly due to the difference at reserve. In all of Lakeside's four home defeats their 1-5 out scored the opposing 1-5 but the matches were lost at reserve. The problem is that the way the draft works it's almost impossible to get worthwhile replacements. I am not implying criticism of any of the riders, it just the way the draft works thst makes the league more or less decided on the picks.

The other problem is that some riders are in the draft who are too good for that level in other words they are more tan capable of holding a place in the 1-5. For example Garrity and Blackbird have both at times been out and replaced expensive foreign imports in heat 13 and scored points at that level so clearly it's a nonsense to have them in protected heats against NL riders. We also have Josh Auty brought into the draft this year. Now with all due respect to Josh, what is he going to learn at reserve for Leicester that he wouldn't already have learned riding at reserve for Coventry 6 years ago? Basically we have probably 4 riders in the top tier of the draft who really ought to be at a higher level and there places should be filled by young riders who need to work alongside the top dogs to gain experience and knowledge. Either the EDR is a genuine attempt to bring on young Brits or it is an attempt to get good riders on the cheap, but it can't be both, although that's what they are trying to do at the moment. The trouble is the sport is on a knife edge at the top level. It only takes one EL club to go under and the Sky deal collapses. These things have to be got right. Unfortunately the PL numpties won't come on board with the scheme, preferring to to go down the rent-a-foreigner route and that is a major part of the problem.

No you are not grasping it. In any business the first step is obviously to get your customers through the door. The more difficult step is to keep them coming back while at the same time keeping your exiting clients.. If someone sees a TV meeting and decides to give it a go consider the following real life situations that may face him : 1. He stands for two hours in the piddling rain at a meeting that shouldn't have started only for one team to decide its too dangerous for them to race but the meeting carries on to heat 10 so he doesn't get any money back. Is he likely to be back ? I doubt it 2. He Goes to a meeting where the stand out riders for the visitors are Freddie Lindgren and Peter Karlsson, and Jason Doyle rides at no1 for the home team. Next time he goes there is another visiting team bur Peter Karlsson is riding for them as well and Freddie Lindgren now rides at No1 for the home team. Next time he goes there is yet another visiting side but Peter Karlsson is riding for that team as well and this time Rory Schlein rides No1 for the home team, then next time he goes Rory is riding for the visiting team. The next week someone else is missing because he is riding for another team in another league so the 1-5 he paid to go to see become a 1-4 and the others take the missing riders rides, and so it goes on. week after week Is he likely to keep coming back ? And all this is without meetings where he stands around in the cold for over two hours because the track has not been properly prepared or the starting gate keeps failing or there are endless false starts or someone needs a break because they have been taking extra rides etc. etc,, There are a whole plethora of similar things that are driving long term fans away. There are many posters on this forum who where once avid fans but who cant be tempted back, or at least cant be tempted back on a regular basis . If the sport cant even hang onto these fans who have been loyal in the past how is it ever going to hang on to new ones who have not even built up any loyalty yet ?

Good promotion only relates to new fans. Poor administration , unfairness, inconsistencies and cheating drive the old ones away and that is a much more serious problem. You could reduce admission to 5p and get a big crowd in for one meeting but few will be back until the other things are sorted out. If it were that simple Glasgow and Swindon would still be getting big crowds on the back of it. Good promotion takes investment that can rarely be recovered in one meeting, You have get people coming back to recover the investment. If long standing fans are drifting away the newbies are unlikely to stay long.

Lambert was riding No2 so in that race he was r/r for Rory. It was therefore Rob Lyons responsibility to notify the Clerk of the Course , opposing team manager and the referee who was taking the ride , and to make sure his rider was ready.

Cook was not talking about why crowds are dropping off he merely said in the programme that he is not a member of the BSPA. I was merely giving my personal view from my perspective based on people I know who have now gone. Maybe you think Ronnie Russell and Sky pulling the strings on heat 10 rain offs when tracks suddenly become dangerous and the rest of the cheating is a good idea but some don't see it that way and that's why they have gone. I don't know what Cooks view on it is and was not reporting it.

That's not the point I was making, but since you raised it who has tried to stop any of this happening ? Peter Adams ? Rosco ? Anyone on the SCB ? Alex Harkess ? Len Silver ? John Louis ? CVS ? I haven't said Jon Cook is speaking out, merely reporting what is now in the public domain, but if it is your point that Cook is one of the last people that can speak out, which of them is in a more credible position ? All much the same as far as I can see unless someone can enlighten me. As I said on another thread regarding the cheating, we know it goes on but we don't know how much or to what extent. Nobody says anything nobody can prove or disprove anything, although having said that, Cook and Douglas were the first ones to make a formal request for an SCB inquiry into the allegations of Poole cheating in 2009 , not that it got them anywhere. The real point being made in my post though was the fact that the heat 10 rain off farce seems to have been the final straw for a lot of long term fans, and TBH I don't think a lot of people realise how many fans take that sort of thing seriously. I really do think that if this Darcy Ward /Swindon tie up turns out to be the stitch up people are saying it is a lot more will go. People on here make jokes bout the older fans who turn up with their deck chairs and sandwiches but for every one that goes it's another £ 18 lost through the gate. For some reason some on here want to hang the whole thing round Cooks neck but it's very much a joint effort .

The crowd was not representative of normal last night partly because crowds always have plummeted for TV meetings anyway , and partly because because of the weather. I don't know what the TV cameras showed but nearly everybody including myself were stood under what shelter there was or in the bar and hardly anyone in the open areas because apart from the rain it was very windy. Plus of course if was a master stroke of bad planning by Sky to slot this meeting on a Monday when Lakeside had already had fixtures last Friday and next Friday, so of course a lot won't bother. Sky is the cause of a lot of trouble in this sport IMO. That said, I do think crowds have fallen in the last couple of years. Jon Cook said recently that crowds started to drop after we lost Rico but it seems to me they really started falling last year when the club started to struggle after Peter Karlsons loss of form and Dave Watts injury, then this year there were four consecutive defeats for all the wrong reasons: partly guests for AJ that didnt perform e.g 6 points from Doyle and four from Lindgren plus being stuck on the wrong end of the EDR draft. As someone said in SS last week the Lakeside 1-5 have averaged almost exactly the same as the Coventry 1--5 this year and only slightly behind Poole yet they are top and Lakeside are nearly bottom because of the way the EDR draft operates. The biggest deterent though,I for most people I I know who have now gone for good is the cheating. The farces we have had involving Poole in matches that get to heat 10 and then the track suddenly becomes dangerous seems to have been the final straw for a lot of people. Fans tolerate things for a long time and then something seems to snap and Sky pulling the strings ( or should I say Ronnie Russel) seems to be it for a lot of people. I am talking about fans with 40 years support behind them who know the sport inside out. If it turns out to be the case that Swindon were fiddling their averages to get Darcy in, a few more will follow. Some promoters are still oblivious to it all though but some are breaking ranks. Miick Horton spoke out publicly the other week, and according to Jon Cooks programme notes he is no longer a member of theBSPA, so reading between the lines it seems there is Big Trouble in Little China just now. We will have to wait and see.

Oh dear so Rob Lyons didn't notify Lakeside that Lambert was in the race and didn't notice hi s rider was going out without a dirt deflector. What exactly does he do as team manager one wonders ?

Ashley looked pretty good against KL on Friday but even better tonight. When John Cook was interviewed he paid tribute to Ash who has played his part in turning the team spirit round and picking everybody's confidence up. He said Ash gets on well with the rest of the team and I think that shows in his riding. He seems to get on especially well with Mikkel Bech , and as Adam Ellis rode probably the best he has ridden all season in the two reserve races I wonder whether that is because he seems to be hitting off a good partnership with Ashley. I have to be honest I was beginning to think that Ash wasn't going to cut it but I am pleased to be proved wrong.

You seem to be implying that the involvement of Sky is detrimental to the sport. Lakeside v a Wolves was provisionally fixed for August when the kids are off school,and attendances are at their highest. By switching it to Monday Lakeside will have 3 home matches in a week so the crowd is bound to be low tomorrow, Surely you can see that makes perfect sense?

Equally, if Lakeside can't pull this one off they might as well give up. In the A fixture Lakeside's reserves scored 3 while Wolves reserves scored 16. With Ashley Birks back and hitting a bit of form one would hope that balance to be restored a bit especially if Adam Ellis manages to stay on his bike. More importantly AJ is back now and should do better than the 6 points Jason Doyle scored when guesting last time. It's also interesting that Mikkel Bech and Jacob Thorssell who were heatleaders last time are now both riding at No2. LAKESIDE . 1. Jonsson 2. Bech 3. Kennet 4 Lawson. 5 Nilsson 6. Ellis. 7. Birks WOLVES. 1. Lindgren. 2. Thorssell 3. Musielak. 4.Wells 5. Karlsson 6. Blackbird . 7. Bates.

That's not representative of, .the whole crowd . Every club has them . There is some fat bloke on the home straight who is currently being discussed on the Lakeside forum, who shouts the most foul mouthed abusive imaginable usually directed at Adam Ellis. These cretins will always appear in any cross section of the public and Speedwáy probably has less than most but its still unfair to tar all the fans with the same brush when in fact it is tiny minority.

The trouble is you never know. We know cheating goes on, but we don't know how much of it. Nobody says anything, nobody can prove anything, nobody can disprove it. People often put two and two together and it looks like it could be four but then again it could be five, so who knows what really is going on ? we are not talking about what he like in the bar !

You can never tell what the traffic will be like. Sometimes it takes me an hour longer to get up to Brandon on a Friday than it takes to get home. The earlier you leave the better it will be. If. You arrive early there are the usual burger bars and also Tracy's Diner on site where you can get a sort of half decent meal by Speedwáy stadium standards or for something better the shopping mall is only about a mile away. If you go in the Lakeside website there is satellite picture of the area with some pretty good directions from the M25, but take your time on some of the roundabouts as the lanes can be a bit confusing. If the traffic is really solid on the M25 near Dartford Tunnel, turn off at J29 and go down the A127 a short distance then up the sliproad onto the A128 which runs parallel to the M25 with a lot less traffic but even that gets busy around South Ockendon from 5-ish. This takes you down to the A1306 about a mile or two east of thrack so you turn left onto it and go down a mild or two and approach the track from the opposite direction . Check out the mao but the golden rule is to give yourself plenty of time because as the afternoon wears on it gets very busy. TV meetings on a Monday don't get much of a cried compared with Friday meetings though.

It's not Lakesides job to spot it. It is Rob Lyons job to look out for these things. No way he should have missed that.

To be fair , Lakeside were really a four man team and although I cant fault Kyle Newman for effort he is no Richard Lawson. Ashley Birks is showing a bit more form now but still rides very wide and Mikkel Bech made his presence felt a bit more than of late. Mikkel was really the architect of Ashley's win over Robert Lambert. He tried really hard to team ride him home but Ash was riding so wide that Mikkel had too much track to cover and had to keep looking behind so much Lambert had every opportunity to slip through. Mikkel could have cleared off and won the race easily and it would still have been a 4-2 but I was impressed with his efforts to try to ride his team mate home. He has his critics but I have to say I do think he is a team player and deserves credit for that. Lambert apparently went out without a dirt deflector. Lakeside would still have won but it cost Lynn a point.. I don't know where you get this "intense hatred" from. Very OTT IMO . He was pretty much anonymous on his last visit but twice the rider this time. Goodness knows what's happened to Kenny bear. He used to be so good round Lakeside in his Peterboro days. His win over AJ shows he can still do it but just seems to vary from race to race.. To be brutally honest KL looked to me vey much like a one man band. based around Niels. Losing Rory is unfortunate and unlucky but after Lakeside's four consecutive home defeats Lynn should have been able to roll them over if they are seriously thinking about winning the play offs. Personally I think KL have lost the sparkle they had last year. It was a funny sort of match and I felt that either side could have won it but neither had the ability to take a lead and make it stick until heat 15 when the Lakeside pair were absolutely on a mission. For the first time I felt Kim looked completely comfortable in a heat 15 ride and he won it by a country mile, so good for him. So onwards and very slowly upwards for the Hammers, back to the drawing board for the Stars if they are going to get anything from the play offs.

Why would Matt Ford let Darcy go to Swindon ? Swindon are still potentially in touch with a play off position, and Darcy coukd propel them there which means he could then line up against the Pirates. On the other hand if Darcy went to a club with no chance of the play offs he would be available for Poole to use as a guest if Magic gets injured and with a bit of a push on Holders average Darcy coukd potentially guest for him as well. Just a thought on my part but no doubt a thought that has crossed Matts mind as well and we know how he likes to cover all his bases. Let's face it if Magic or. Holder were injured what better guest could there be ?

No he can't. He will be riding for Glasgow. Lakeside have a guest for him.....wait for it..... Kyle Newman. What a farce. It all is. R/R for Rory which means two of his rides taken by fast track reserves, and all Lawsons rides taken by a fast track reserve.j EDIT It may be two second strings and an EDR for Rory plus Ken the Bear but either way yet another meeting disrupted by unbalanced team strengths. Not poor Rory's fault of course but this seems to be happening every match now. On top of that after one meeting in 5weeks Lakeside now have 3 meetings in 8 days. No surprise the crowds continue to fall, not just Lakeside, everywhere.

The same probably goes for 75% of fans of EL clubs. Endless guests, often the same ones at the same tracks for different teams, great long gaps between fixtures so the season never really seems to get going, tracks that are supposedly safe up to heat 10 then suddenly become too dangerous to ride, fiddling averages, and of course the EDR shambles, to name just a few. Never felt so disenchanted with the sport in my life. The BSPA have really excelled themselves this year.

Assuming Batch's bike problems are genuine the difference in final scores is very similar to the difference between the two sides reserves, so yet again another match won by the BIG difference ar reserve , like most of them these days and yet another example of the dogs breakfast they have made of the Farce Track System. Whether it is blatant cheating or whether it is the luck of the draw with the EDR, makes no difference, either way they have gone up up yet another notch in driving more fans away. Is to much to ask that throughout the sport we get a fair, competive nights entertainment for our 18 quid?