fubar

Jack Smith returns to help us give our woolly friends another good shearing. Seems to be a bit of rain forecast for the Buxton area on Sunday morning but hopefully it will all clear away in time.

Yes, great racing, proper seats, clean toilets and a good atmosphere. Apart from having to fight your way through the bloody traffic, you can't fault it really. But hey, coldace, don't go telling too many people, we don't want it getting too crowded, do we?

Quite an entertaining meeting and an easy enough win for the Colts. Kyle Bickley and Ben Woodhull looked particularly strong and even young Dicken seemed to be more on the pace. Only Wilson and Wallinger were any good for Buxton. the rest of them may as well have stayed at home and saved the petrol. Over the hills to Buxton on Sunday for the 2nd leg but can't see the Colts throwing away this kind of lead.

Thunder and lightning now shown over Gloomy Road on Saturday night! At most places you would be worried about the power getting knocked out but fortunately, Gloomy Road has it's own generator...............

.....and I don't like to appear negative but there are a couple of spots of rain showing over Gloomy Road at 7 p.m. tomorrow on the latest weather map. Argh..................

Wow, that's worrying. The Brummies have been taken over by the sheep rustlers. The Birmingham Britmen perhaps?

Bit of a shame that Jack Smith is absent but Ben Hopwood is a fair replacement. Weather looking good which is more than you can say for Gloomy Road on Saturday night!

I was going to write something about tomorrow night's clash but I nodded off....... Seriously, the colts need to win this by a good 20 points to give themselves a good chance of the overall win. Depending on how thrilling this encounter is will determine whether I head for them there hills on Sunday afternoon.

And the Gloomy Roadsters don't need to bother trolling over to the Buxton Sheep Fanciers tomorrow because their Joseph Lucas ( the Prince of Darkness) generator has given up the ghost. This is all turning into a bit of a shambles.

I wouldn't mind but those Richards people were meant to have done all the drains a couple of years ago and I remember going and having a look at the work in progress and they certainly seemed to be doing a pretty major job. Tattum and co were banging on about how there would be a lot less rain-offs in the future. Another figment of someone's imagination methinks,

Lovely sunny evening in Stoke. Been cracking the flags all afternoon. How can a meeting can be lost to the weather with no rain to be seen? Doesn't bode well for the rest of the season.

The people who run Formula 1 are brighter than the people who run speedway. Formula 1 has dispensed with grid girls as they are no longer appropriate for a global audience. So who is more likely to be right Formula 1 or Speedway?

Where did I say anything was embarrassing?

As usual, Sings4Speedway speaks wise words.

Why do you think that I have an issue with an attractive woman? I am merely suggesting that Speedway as a global family sport which attempts to appeal to populations around the world with different ethnicities and belief systems needs to be ahead of the curve with regard to how it seeks to promote itself. Of course, the fact that I am camper than a row of pink tents probably explains my viewpoint. Only joking!

I can assure you that I don't have "the problem". It is the global sport of speedway that may have the problem if it doesn't realize that if it wishes to attract global audiences and corporate advertising then it must move with the times and accept that peoples' expectations change. If people have a desire to closely inspect the anatomy of other people, I am sure that a subscription to Health and Efficiency will prove more suitable. Of course, BWitcher, you may well be right and the majority of TV viewers may be in your camp but I choose not to be.

So, these mostly young riders are taken on by various clubs just so as the fairground operators can keep the show on the road and as long as the punters keep coughing up their shekels every couple of weeks then everything in the garden is rosy? Surely, promoters owe some duty of care to young riders and in return for them trolling all round the country to race for less than 5 minutes a meeting at probably not inconsiderable expense and risk to themselves then the clubs need to give some kind of ongoing support to these riders rather than simply giving them the heave ho whenever it suits their short-term objectives. One might hope that the governing body might lay down guidelines on how young riders should be treated and developed but then we are talking speedway here so there is probably more chance of me becoming Pope Fubar the First. I am trying to remember the name of the young lad who came down from Scotland a couple of season's ago to be Stoke's reserve but I don't think his feet touched the ground before he was given the order of the boot. I hate to think what effect this casual discarding must have on the self esteem and mental well-being of these youngsters but don't lets worry as I am sure there will be some more cannon fodder pitching up any time soon. Seems all a bit shoddy to me but perhaps I expect too much of people.......

Can you tell us more about these changes and when they are effective from, f-s-p?

I watched some Polish speedway last night where there were grid girls. The zooming in close ups of parts of these young women's anatomy was frankly pathetic. If you were sitting watching this with your children/grandchildren how would you explain this camera work to them. Time to move on.

Well, if the lad is that useless why have Stoke taken him on? If you were the head honcho at Gloomy Road how many meetings would you give William before you replace him with another bargain basement hopeful?

Wow, there are loads of us who only made a single visit to the Shay. It wasn't that bad, surely? I seem to remember Belle Vue getting well beaten by Kenny Carter's crew and I do recollect some very hard seats. It can't have been that great otherwise I would have made the effort to go back again but then again, I've never been particularly fond of West Yorkshire.

I'm sorry that William appears to be taken on and then discarded whenever the wind changes direction. Whilst he may not have set the world alight, the lad does seem a genuine trier and I really do hope that, as seems to happen with so many of these youngsters, he doesn't get booted out before he gets the chance to make some kind of a mark. Hope it works out for the young man.

William O'Keefe it is then. Sorry, lad.

Yes, me too. I emailed them this morning to tell them that it's brill.

Yes he certainly wasn't on the pace but he didn't fall off and his technique looked a bit better than at last week's woeful performance. I was watching him in the pits and his attitude seemed quite good with his dad mentoring him all the time. He didn't seem to throw a wobbler and they seem to be working on improving bit by bit, admittedly from a pretty low starting point. Not sure about the haircut though - a bit too Peaky Blinders for my tastes. Nice to see Andy Mellish and David Holt making themselves a bit useful in the pits.