YeOldPitGate

If though at first set of new averages VP is off 1 point to 1.5 points it will give a bit of flexibility to strengthen up elsewhere I don't think he's a bad signing personally but granted if ideally he was a four he would probably be the best number four in the league, but I think if he stays injury free he will average over seven points a match.

As Cookie say above ,a friend of mine owns two business's one is an absolute cash cow, the other is a pub which turns over a mil a year but still is loss making. As my friend is an old softie he doesn't want to sell the pub as the girl who runs it for him lives there and he doesn't want to make her homeless. Part of the profits from the successful business is offset against the pub losses to reduce the overall profit figure, as you say if you only had one business you would be making more money but if you want the cudos of owning the local speedway club having a successful outside business is one way of partly subsiding the failing business. As another example Tolley has his badge business which I'm guessing must make a fortune so as a result he can write off six figures of losses a year at speedway without blinking.

Forget the league if its four teams lets head straight for the play off's

Don't forget in line with the general speedway trend there's probably only 40 of us knocking around this forum these days.

This is the problem clubs are essentially worthless you are being asked to buy into a dying business model so the only likely buyers will be long term fans, it used to be that when a club was in trouble their would be several interested parties but with speedways ageing demographic a lot of the wealthy fans are now pushing up the daisies leaving an ever shrinking pool to possibly be the latest saviour of the club/s.

There are still rumours of a six team top league given nobody in the championship wants to commit financial suicide by moving up is there a likelyhood someone with money to burn is going to take on Northampton ?

Thing is reading between the lines it looked like the plan was Bewley to Ipswich and Belle Vue retaining Kurtz in 2026 if Belle Vue end up retaining Dan it could leave Ippo having to attempt at some kind of strength in depth approach whatever that may look like.

Bit like signing for Scunny and then saying I'm off if Sheff are in one league, Shotgun load, point at foot, pull trigger, repeat.

Agreed I was late teens when Benn, Watson, Eubank, Collins, Hameed, Tyson and Holyfield were starting to all come on the scene the late 80's - late 90's were brilliant years early Tyson easily the best heavyweight I have ever scene and Benn snr was my all time fave he had some incredible wars over the years. One of my all time fave quotes "lets have some parliamentary procedure"

Agreed it will be the most rigged fight ever AJ might be ten years past his best but there's a real risk he could kill Paul if he hit him with an uppercut so the word will have to go down come in one 20% of your ability tops but your right it will still pull in a fortune in readies.

Tony Rikardson wasn't bad either.

To be fair M.D, Mike after he won the world championship was about as reliable as the british summer at that point moving forward. I remember his comeback meeting at Lynn after his ban a year out and he beat Erik Gunderson the then world champion on his first race back but from that point he just started to lose interest and missed loads of meetings he didn't fancy. It was a real shame in his final comeback early 90's as to how far he had fallen Andy Meredith who at this point was a wobbler was ahead of him and Mike was lining him up perfectly to pass on every single corner but he just didn't have the bottle anymore to pull the move off.

Will there be the usual hide and seek games with Cook this season.

If there's only five teams they might as well go straight to the play off's, the strongest looking side gets a first round bye, and whoever scores the least out of the remaining four is out with the top three going through with the bye team to the semis. It might be a case as others have floated maybe in 2026 the weakest two prem sides are amalgamated into the championship and the top three try to put decent sides together with a view to having a euro league with Sweden and Denmark given half the riders are based abroad it probably wouldn't be much more expensive flight wise and the likes of Harris, Lawson, Pickering etc could still double down.

Agreed Louis did as much as can be expected of a modern day promoter but as you say if the rest are losing money, or turning up with half the riders missing your own product is going to get dragged down regardless in the race to the bottom.