BarracudaAce

Including me the attendance was 13,697. It was a sell-out according to the sign "Wszystkie sprzedane bilety" at the ticket office, and we bumped into several people outside the stadium trying to get hold of tickets. I'd logged-on to my on-line Sparta account the very minute tickets became available, but had to wait 50 minutes before I could even access the sales page and ended up getting tickets in a block next to the one I was planning to buy in. Fantastic atmosphere despite the thrashing they were being given - and it became very noisy when Drabik and Janowski got a 5-1 over Sayfutdinov and Kurtz in heat 8 to bring the deficit down to 19-29. It was then probably the quietest a few minutes later when Kolodziej and Hampel grabbed a 4-2 over Woffy and Jamrog in heat 9. A bit of an odd, and perhaps unexpected fact I suppose, in my last two visits to Wroclaw (last Sunday and last August v. Torun) Woffy had a total of 11 rides and only won one of them!! And that one win only because of Piotr Pawlicki's engine failure in heat 13 on Sunday. This latest trip was a 6 day visit and we'd been to Gorzow v Czestochowa on Friday night. Despite the early 6pm start time the attendance was 9,605, including a smattering of Czestochowa fans. They would defo have had to take the day off work with a journey of a little over 300 miles!!

That match up brings back a few memories for me. On my first visit to Poland to attend league matches in 2008, one of the two matches we attended that visit was Poznan v Bydgoszcz in the second tier. Visitors Bydgoszcz brought quite a fans' following with them (the two places are around 140 miles apart) and had Andreas Jonsson at No.1. And down at reserve was a then relatively unknown 18 year old Russian by the name of Emil Sayfutdinov. In a last heat decider Bydgoszcz won 46-44.

Slightly off-topic, but in response to geoff100 - how horrible to see the photo from Derwent Park in the latest edition of the Speedway Star, and the news that the shale was being removed. Sadly, there are so many tracks I travelled to see Barracudas visit throughout the 1970s that no longer exist - including, of course, Boston itself - and with the removal of the shale, it seems that might now be fate of speedway at Derwent Park. The site of Boston's own New Hammond Beck Road stadium and car parks is now occupied by Tesco; B & Q and Aldi. Sad to say that there is virtually absolutely no chance of the sport ever returning to Boston - especially after all the efforts of Stephen Lambert (Simon's father) to find a new site in the Boston area during the time he ran Boston Barracudas and riding home matches at King's Lynn.

In the Speedway Star (edition dated 25 May 2019), the 'Spotlight On' article on page 23 featured MSC Olching of Germany. It mentioned that the Olching team had undertaken a tour of UK Second Division tracks in 1973. Well, the article reminded me of perhaps the biggest anti-climax in my entire almost 50 years of watching speedway. One of the clubs Olching visited was my hometown team, Boston Barracudas, and pre-match it was advertised as likely being one of the toughest matches the ‘Cudas were going to face that entire season. I can still remember the excitement building up to the start of the match – I was a teenager and a programme seller at New Hammond Beck Road in those days – and I remember we even opened the turnstiles, and began selling programmes, earlier than usual for the 6.45p.m. start. But oh dear - what a let-down!! The result? BOSTON BARRACUDAS 64 – 12 OLCHING It was the old 13 heats format back then, of course, when a maximum a team could score was 65 points. And, if I remember correctly without visiting the loft to dig out the programme, the only Boston rider to be beaten and not score a max/paid max that day was Tony Featherstone. Apologies to ‘Tiger Tony’ if it wasn’t him. Such was that score line totally unexpected, and the match a huge anti-climax, the Barracudas' management published an apology in both the local Boston Standard newspaper, and in the following week’s programme, for the one-sided nature of the meeting. Thankfully, there was lots of excitement during that year to more than compensate for that particularly disappointing Sunday evening - the Barracudas completing a League and KO Cup double!! I can’t honestly remember the other tracks that Olching visited on that tour, but maybe some supporters will be able to add to this thread with their memories of the German club’s visit to race against their team?

The move to sign Erik and then have MPT at reserve has to be the 'team change' of the season. Ironically - given the injury facts you stated in the first paragraph which have 'ruined' the Aces season - would the Stars be where they are now had Kerr NOT got injured? If Stars go onto win the title then it has all worked out for you - and, despite our woes with injuries at the NSS, its all part and parcel of speedway and would we want it any other way? (of course, we don't want to see any rider actually getting hurt but, unfortunately, it is that very thing that produces many team changes and the way things then pan out). Whilst there are still 15 heats of the semi-final to ride, I suppose we should always cling onto hope? But, if the Aces can't become champions, then I hope it is finally the Stars turn. I was a regular attender at Saddlebow Road during the Betts / Simmons / Cole / Lee era through the 70s before I moved to the Manchester area, and so the Stars were once upon a time my 'top flight' club. It would then be good to see the yellow and green (as they were back then and I reckon still should be) as champions!!

(1).....literally in some cases!! (2) IMHO that sums it up perfectly. MPT really seems to enjoy Manchester. As well as his exploits at the NSS, he had a very good home season with the Aces at Kirky Lane Greyhound Stadium.

If a rider does not have any medical certification, but simply decides he doesn't want to ride anymore, I suppose some kind of 'suspension' could be placed on him. If this was towards the end of the season (as has happened with Mark) then the suspension would be for the start of the new season - and might mean, of course, he wouldn't get a job initially. Would that then be considered too harsh a 'punishment' or not? Also, should the club(s) that rider rides for be punished? Should it only have been a National League rider to a certain average that was allowed to replace him? As Mark made his decision when he did, neither Ipswich nor Belle Vue were allowed to sign a replacement and so the guest facility came into play. The problem with guests is, of course, that it is done on a 'horses-for-courses' basis. There is an argument that says Jye's 9 points on Monday were more than Mark would have scored given their current form. Highly unlikely, but hypothetically, Belle Vue could have a guest at reserve in the 2nd Leg at Saddlebow Road that chalks up a dozen points or so in a shock 50-40 Aces win. So 21 points from two guests to edge the Aces to a 91-89 aggregate win. Given the remarks made on here and elsewhere about why Mark has finished his season early, would that then open more 'conspiracy' theories?

Naturally every rider will react differently to different situations but, in varying degrees, I reckon you could say that for every rider that has ever sat upon a speedway bike.

From an email I received from the RFL this week re: the SuperLeague Grand Final on 13th October, it seems that 10 of the 14 blocks priced at the top price of £85 have already sold out. The blocks at the next price down (£65) are completely sold out, and half of the third price category blocks at £50 are sold out. This event must obviously appeal to 'neutral' Rugby League supporters, as the two semi-finals have yet to be played!! I suppose Old Trafford is fairly well situated geographically for a good number of rugby league supporters in the 'M62 corridor', but I wonder how many neutral speedway supporters would be attracted to travel to a one-off Grand Final, say at the NSS on a Saturday early evening between Poole and King's Lynn? And how many of the regular supporters of the participating clubs would be prepared to travel where - if speedway was to follow the SuperLeague - the top price tickets would be up to 4 times the usual admission prices? A total non-starter I'd imagine though, if there was ever a one-off Final, the NSS would be the perfect TRACK to have it on.

Was at the same match and couldn't agree more!! Having visited a number of Polish cities over the last eleven years or so, I commented to a friend that Wroclaw was fast becoming my favourite Polish city and Polish speedway venue.

I'd agree. He was really in the thick of the action last night. And, in a recent Ekstraliga match I attended in Poland, he was superb - starting his night by passing Tai Woffinden to win heat 1 on Tai's home track. He went onto win three heats, had two thirds and fell off in his other ride whilst in a close fought race with Max. Max, himself, has been simply brilliant in recent matches at the NSS, but his efforts don't seem to translate into big point hauls regularly yet in Poland. In the same match Max netted just 4+2 from 5 rides but rode hard all night. It certainly would be good to see them both in the GPs in the coming years. Shame they're not British to join, say, Tai, Robert Lambert and Dan Bewley in Team GB. Pure conjecture, but if we still had the same situation that existed in the days when Ivan Mauger and Briggo rode in the British team, we might just have had a future World Cup winning line-up with those five??

Certainly from the mid-point of the match you did. I hope you'll be able to see a TV repeat showing, or other recording, and hit the rewind button a few times on heat 13!!

If you get the opportunity you must!! Although I've visited Poznan and Gdansk for other meetings, I have also attended both venues for Polish Second Division matches. It was at the huge track in Poznan - 10 years ago now - that I saw a 'derby' match between Poznan and Bydgoszcz that went to a last heat decider. Adam Skornicki and Andreas Jonsson were, without checking to make sure, the respective team captains and the visitors won 46-44. Leaving the match, we had really been impressed with one of the Bydgoszcz reserves. Despite being the Under-21 World Champion he was then still relatively little known in the UK, but in this match had really been the difference between the two sides . He would later go onto become a Grand Prix rider (and now a Speedway of Nations World Champion).....none other than Emil Sayfutdinov!!

I attended a match in Gdansk a few weeks ago when Rybnik were the visitors. In one of the heats the two minutes were counting down (the ‘grand prix’ style clock was positioned alongside the start line) and, with three riders already at the gate, the fourth rider entered the track from the pits (pits gate on 3rd / 4th turns) with time still remaining. Time expired, though, when he was literally just two or three metres from the tapes. As he then moved right up to the tapes, the red lights came on and he was immediately shown the black exclusion flag and his helmet colour disk. The referee then started the race within a very short space of time with no reserve substitution for the excluded rider. Also, having been at three Polish matches in the last couple of months, I don’t think the total amount of time spent gardening from all three matches combined would be any longer than we see during one match here in the UK!!

The match I attended v Pila was the 4th of their 7 home matches they rode between 30th July and 30th August, having already completed their 7 away matches. These home matches included some on weekdays when they had start times between 4.45pm and 5.30pm due to the floodlights not having been brought into use. This would obviously have an effect on their attendances. The fact, too, that they unable to make the playoffs after losing at home to Rybnik in their 3rd home match might have put off some folks trying to rush there straight from work? The Rybnik match was held on a Saturday when the attendance was just over 5,000 (the capacity I understand is 10,400) and they opened some of the stands around 1st/2nd (the ‘home’ end) and 3rd/4th turns and along the home straight. The all-seater stadium, incidentally, I’d best describe as a ‘single tiered mini-Torun’ with all the stands covered and the pits situated along the back straight. On the day I was there it was just the 1st/2nd turns and the home straight open, and I had a fantastic view from the back row at the exit of the second bend. I was told afterwards that the attendance was 3,612 by one of the officials at the merchandise stall, and I did see that the Speedway Star reported it as 3,500. (They do seem to ‘round up / down’ the Polish attendances in the Star, they showed the Wroclaw v Torun attendance from two nights later as 11,000 when the published attendance was shown as 10,847.) With regards to that small attendance 2ndBender saw, it might well have been the opening match. They had a very last minute problem, after selling tickets, in obtaining the final ‘health & safety’ clearance certificate and this severely affected the number of fans allowed into the stadium. As Mark says, next season will give them a much better indication on the attendances. If they have all their home matches at weekends – and are challenging for the play-offs – you’d like to think they will have more seats occupied than empty. For 2ndBender, here’s an email address I used to make enquiries before my visit (I received a very useful and informative reply) that you could use if you’d like to contact them about obtaining a programme from the opening match. klub@orzel.lodz.pl It possibly might be that they issued just one magazine style programme to cover all 7 meetings, and then had different scorecharts included for the respective matches. The programme I bought had team and other photos and narrative for the last 10 seasons or so and had scorecharts inside for both the Pila match and the Krakow match two days later. Finally, here's a couple of photo I found on the Lodz website. The one on the left shows the very vociferous fans on the 1st / 2nd turns during the parade. The second shows me on the back row (red & black Aces cap) busy filling in the programme. The guy stood up in the yellow/red/green shirt was busy leading the Pila fans in their cheering and chants. There was no segregation in place and there was a good few Pila fans sitting below and left of him off-photo.

As I mentioned briefly in the Wroclaw v Torun, Sunday August 19th. topic, I made a visit to Lodz to see their new speedway stadium whilst I was staying in Wroclaw last month. The match I attended was Lodz v Pila on Friday 17th August. The new stadium is indeed very impressive, and I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. Everything, however, isn’t up and running yet. There was no ticket office or club shop in operation, with ticket sales from a van on the roadside and merchandising from a couple of tables outside the stadium. Admission tickets were 25 zloty (£5.26) and programmes (£1.05). The electronic turnstiles were not in use and entrance was through the exit gates with someone checking and clipping tickets. Not all the toilet blocks were open with those in use being ‘unisex’. The floodlights were not yet commissioned, so hence the unusually early weekday start time of 5:15p.m. The area between the old and new stadiums is still very much like a building site and, for those that know the Belle Vue area; the old and new Lodz stadiums are much much closer than the NSS is to the Greyhound Stadium. Before the match I had an interesting 15 minutes or so talk with Hans Andersen. He wasn’t selected to ride in the Lodz team that day, but was about to do some ‘meet and greet’ with the fans at the merchandise stand. He mentioned that he very much liked racing at the NSS, but hadn’t been able to put four or five consistent rides together. ‘I can win some, but also run lasts’ he said – as if to predict exactly what he would go on to do three days later when he had two wins and a last amongst his rides in the Aces v Leicester match!! Thankfully, the refreshments stands were all open – it was a very hot and sunny day and touching 30 Celsius – and, as I was in the queue, one of the Lodz supporters struck up a conversation with me when he heard me speak and spotted my Aces cap. He was most likely in his late 40s and spoke English more than good enough to hold a conversation, insisting on buying me a beer. Later at the end, he and his friends came over to me outside. They must have spotted me buying a Lodz cap at the merchandise stand, as he presented me with a Lodz scarf and said ‘to go with your new cap’. Before waving goodbye he said they don’t often get foreign visitors – ‘they all want to go to Torun or Gorzow’ he said ‘so we are happy you’ve come to see us’. Speedway fans eh? Fantastic people. As for the match itself, there was some good racing with Lodz beating Pila 53-37. It had been pretty close through the first half of the match, and after heat 6 it was only 19-17. Pila, though, only managed one heat advantage after that, but when they had either Thomas H. Jonasson or Tomasz Gapinski out on track there was some good battles with the Lodz heat leaders. For Lodz, Aces’ Rohan Tungate scored 6+2 from 3 completed rides - he had a tapes exclusion in his other heat - and Poole’s Josh Grajczonek 4+1 from 4 outings. For Pila, Thomas H. Jonasson was in fine form scoring 15+1 from 6 rides whilst Tomasz Gapinski got 11 from 5. The track length in the new stadium is 321 metres and, at the time, Rohan Tungate held the track record at 58.84. I’m not sure, though, if it’s now been bettered as they’ve had a few meetings since as they catch up with their home matches. There was just one sub-60 second winning time in the Pila match, however, and that was 59.94 by Lodz reserve Jakub Miskowiak in the reserves race. He went onto score 11 from 5 rides. It was quite a long day as the coach had left Wroclaw at 10:15a.m. on Friday, getting back at 12:30a.m. going into Saturday morning. It was well worth it, though, and it would be nice to return one day to Lodz to see the fully finished stadium and surrounds.

It seems that there were quite a few of us from the UK over for this match a couple of weeks ago, and at least two Belle Vue supporters (STEPHEN333 and myself – though I don’t think we know each other). I was in Wroclaw from the Wednesday to the Monday (flew back Monday afternoon and went to the NSS for Belle v. Leicester on the Monday night). I also took in Lodz v Pila during my stay and I’ll put a little bit about this on another thread. In Wroclaw I met a group of Coventry Bees fans twice (once in the tourist information office in Wroclaw Old Town square and the other time back at the airport) and had a nice chat with them before they headed to their flight back to East Midlands Airport. And I also met three Glasgow Tigers fans in a bar in the Old Town Square and we had a long chat over a couple of beers. At the stadium itself I saw two guys wearing Poole Pirates tops in the distance but, not getting to speak to them, they might have been locals. Just reading your post STEPHEN333, I hope you weren’t ‘ripped off’ with your money exchange, as some of your sterling conversion prices seemed a little on the high side. I bought some zlotys in Poland at a rate of 4.75 and had some remaining from a visit to Gdansk a few weeks earlier where I'd bought some at 4.84. At 4.75 that made the prices for me (a) Wroclaw ticket £8.42 rather than £11.00; (b) the programme £1.68 rather than £2.00; (c) 10 zloty beers £2.10 rather than £2.50 and (d) the day tram tickets £2.31 rather than £2.75. In the Old Town square the beers in the bar where I was talking to the Glasgow fans were 8 zloty (£1.68) and, at a craft beer place a little further along, my beer of choice there was 12 zloty (£2.52). Interesting that the beers sold at the speedway stadiums these days are actually 0.4 litre size rather than the 0.5 litre (what we’d usually equate to a pint) and are a little weaker at 3.5 abv than the standard strength. I noticed this at Wroclaw this time, and also visits last year to Grudziadz and Torun and this year at Lodz and Gdansk. Last year in Grudziadz I was talking to one of the Grudziadz officials and he was telling me that Tyskie produced such a beer for events, including football and speedway, and this strength beer and size of serving had been introduced all over the country. I can’t recall just when he said this started, it could well have been happening in the years before, but until the chat with the guy at Grudziadz it had never really been something I’d even thought about. With the exception of a couple of seasons, I’ve now been fortunate to attend at least one speedway match in Poland every year since 2007 and I’m now up to having seen racing at 10 different venues. Whatever 2019 brings I would, though, like to go back to Wroclaw again.