arthur cross

Doesn't really matter what I thought because both a rider (Chris Harris) and one of the clowns who was promoting the meeting (Dave Gordon) have both declared publicly that it wasn't raceable ... and it's those quotes that will matter in any eventual settling of the blame. For my part, it was awkward enough to wonder whether it could really cope with being raced upon rather than just used for warm-up laps.

Even by the ostrich-headed standards of many folk too near the sharp end of speedway, that wretchedly lazy attitude takes some beating. It shows no evidence of having learnt anything much from the first time it happened before, never mind the 100th, 200th or umpteen hundredth time it's already happened before. Equally, it shows no willingness to learn from past clangers to reduce the risk of them happening again in the future. It simply trundles along, hand-in-hand with that other cop-out of shrugging your shoulders amid the chaos and proudly declaring "that's speedway".

Because fans can gracefully accept a postponement or abandonment if it had rained or there had been a series of crashes leading to lengthy delays or ambulance issues. Different story entirely when a superstar meeting in a shiny new stadium has been hyped up for many months, encouraging spectators to travel from much further afield than your forum-name suggests, only to be postponed in farcical circumstances a few minutes after it was supposed to have started because of track conditions the home promotion have since had the nerve (or abject stupidity) to admit weren't raceable. Do you understand now why plenty of folk who spent hundreds of pounds as a family or car-load to attend on Saturday remain so upset at having their time, fuel, food/drink and hotel bills wasted even if they'll eventually get a refund or another meeting for their admission ticket ? !! ... good, if you do ... hopelessly narrow-minded in your own world if you don't !!

Perfectly entitled to do that ... but in the meantime, any proper PR solution would get a holding statement out well before 9.30 explaining that such consultations with appropriate parties are now underway based on the previously-trumpeted Wed/9am decision ... that's how you neatly buy a few more hours' time (easily until mid-afternoon in this case) to come up with a more clear-cut statement. Instead ... nearly 3 hours (and counting) of deafening silence. PR isn't just about what you're saying at any particular time ... it's also (sometimes much more importantly) about thinking a couple of steps ahead of what you're currently saying and getting your defence in first. Otherwise it looks as if anything to do with 9am/Wednesday in this particular case was just any old time-&-date plucked out of thin air.

Plymouth have always insisted that Fridays worked much better than Saturdays because that means most holidaymakers are approaching the end of their week or fortnight away if they fancied a night at the speedway rather than just settling into their hotel/caravan for the week after driving down the M5/A38 on Saturday morning. However, back around 2009 or 2010 when a step up to the Premier League was first mooted for Plymouth, the northern clubs in that league were very keen to include a clause on the Devils that would force Plymouth to offer a few Thursday or Saturday home meetings to allow any northern clubs to do a Somerset/Plymouth tour. For example, a Thursday track like Sheffield or Redcar would go to Somerset Friday and then Plymouth Saturday ... meanwhile, a Sunday track like Newcastle or Glasgow would go to Plymouth Thursday and then Somerset Friday. (Somerset would always keep hold of their Fridays within the rule of "fixture seniority" between an established team and a newly-promoted team using the same usual home night.) But any such "Thu/Sat-at-Plymouth" clause got lost in the chaos of speedway's 2010-11 "winter of discontent" when Coventry and Peterborough walked out of the BSPA-AGM and both King's Lynn and Birmingham moved up to the Elite League to ensure there would still be the minimum-required 8 Elite clubs to satisfy Gospeed's Sky deal even if Coventry and Peterborough couldn't be restored. The knock-on effect of the step-ups for King's Lynn and Birmingham was the Premier League were far more welcoming than previously expected to Plymouth as an ideal way of replacing one of the two clubs they'd just lost. As it turned out, Coventry and Peterborough did get back on board in time for the 2011 season so the Elite League ran with 10 clubs and Plymouth squeezed into the Premier League without having to fit their northern visitors into Thursdays or Saturdays.

Genuine question for anyone closely linked to Belle Vue ... Given the stock cars are still using the greyhound stadium's shale track for 2016 with holiday-Monday meetings on all of next week, 2nd May & 30th May, is it even a slightly realistic prospect that the Aces & Colts could use that track as well to clear some of their early-season fixtures if the remedial/relaying work at the new stadium forces anything longer than about a month's delay ? !! While clearly the much better availability of the new stadium could clear a fixture pile-up perfectly easily via 2 or 3 home meetings a week in mid-summer, the cashflow impact of taking part only in away meetings without home crowd-revenue for the next few weeks is going to put yet another strain on Belle Vue.

Given even basic PR standards at the messaging club, I'd say your etiquette is absolutely correct. Given the near total absence of any PR standards at this particular messaging club, I don't blame Edinburgh (or Cradley, or the "live on Sky" section of that tv-network's website) on this occasion for covering their respective angles of the fallout from Saturday's fiasco without waiting for the go-ahead. The continuing deafening silence from Belle Vue this morning simply reinforces Edinburgh/Cradley/Sky's attitude.

News obviously travels slowly to Edinburgh if it only got there yesterday afternoon from Monday's meet-the-riders night at Cradley where West Midlands fans were told both Good Friday and Easter Monday (BV Colts v Cradley) were already off, prompting all sorts of scurrying from the Belle Vue end to find out how they knew One golden rule of PR is that if you set yourself a time a couple of days ahead to update a sticky situation, for goodness sake have something, anything, the smallest shred of new information to keep any recovery ticking along at the appointed time. Mind you, if your PR's so hopeless despite having the ear of folk like Philip Rising, I guess this morning's deafening silence becomes normal.

Very well noted ... yet, incredibly, repeated attempts by one enlightened promoter to at least debate adapting the North American major leagues' model of conferences/divisions into British speedway has been ignorantly discarded every time in a hurry, sometimes with ridiculously abusive responses. Too many glory-hunting promoters lose sight of the fact that most 65-25 runaway wins in speedway are far less entertaining than a 7-0 win in football or a 60-0 demolition in rugby because at least the goals/tries have to be scored by skilfully working your way through or past the opposition for every score instead of simply leaving them behind at the first bend of most speedway heats in a similar thrashing. By the way, Eastbourne's volunteering to step down to the 2015 National League is the 2nd-best shrewdly realistic decision I've seen in our domestic speedway in recent years, beaten only by Ipswich's volunteering to step down to the 2011 Premier League within days of tasting that level in their 2010 Elite-relegation meetings against Newcastle.

In that case, particularly if you have a closer vantage point, who is ? !!

All sorts of ways that very serious doubts (if not a face-saving early postponement) were being talked about leading up to Saturday's fiasco. Most notably, can anyone who was at Coventry on Friday confirm whether Graham Reeve was listed in the programme as that meeting's referee because, as far as I've been reliably informed, nearby referee Dave Watters took that duty at short notice after Mr Reeve was suddenly required to take his SCB-official (but not meeting-referee) hat to Belle Vue on the eve of their big night ... not surprisingly, that alteration in the Coventry ref's box sparked plenty of knowledgeable discussion in the pits and on the terraces.

So it's taken 11 years and nearly 5 months since Colin Hill's death (30-Oct-2004) to reach today's extraordinarily-timed exit by the club who galloped so recklessly through the final chunk of his legacy for speedway, ideally in-or-around Exeter but later widened across the rest of Devon. My first dealings with any speedway promoter were with Colin Hill in 1988-&-89 when I was studying in Exeter so although I now live well away from the South-West, it saddens me greatly to see such an abrupt end for the Devils. I've plenty of sympathy for Plymouth's riders and fans ... another name I'd add to that list (although I've often been critical of his overall BSPA chairmanship in recent years) is Alex Harkess given his immense determination in previous winters to keep the Devils included within the Premier League. What a kick in the teeth for such outside effort in the recent past for the local guardians of the club to bale out at such an early stage of this season ... at the very least, the Devils riders, fans and the speedway world in general deserve a much better explanation than today's brief news from David Short (or anyone else near the top of that club) to explain why it's taken just one individual meeting to drive such a wretched skewer into their 2016 budget. From my distance, it looks like Mr Short should never again be allowed anywhere near the running of a speedway club given the budget gap that's suddenly yawned open here.

No, because the muppet of a promoter hosting the meeting has confirmed by his own quote that he was trying to promote a meeting whose track wasn't raceable !!

So we now have a situation where, based on other informed postings on this forum ... 1. Last Wednesday, before any SCB track licence was granted (that only happened on Friday), Belle Vue were advised that the least-worst scenario given the several weeks of cold, non-drying March weather and the state of the 3rd/4th bends was to call off the Peter Craven meeting with a couple of days' notice (still awkward for those fans who'd booked non-refundable hotels but, apart from that, plenty of expenses all round could be swerved) ... at that stage, it was still in Dave Gordon's control as Belle Vue's Chief Executive Officer to take such a decision (or, at the very least, alert anyone like the city council or the track contractors about just how seriously the meeting was in doubt). 2. On Friday, with serious doubts within the speedway network about the meeting going ahead (witness plenty of talk about it around the pits and terraces of both the home openers at Coventry & King's Lynn), the SCB incredibly granted the new stadium its track licence given that this licence only refers to the fixtures-&-fittings rather than the state of the track surface, thereby removing one obstacle (the lack of a track licence) that would have forced a Peter Craven postponement even if Gordon or his fellow clown Chris Morton didn't have the guts to do it themselves anyway. (Going forward, at the earliest possible opportunity, surely there must be an amendment to the SCB rulebook that at least the first-time granting of a track licence requires a test of the raceability of the new facility's track surface, even if subsequent renewals of any track licence can still stick to just an inspection of the fixtures-&-fittings.) 3. Reflecting on Saturday, having wasted the chance to call the inevitable farce off a few days earlier, Dave Gordon now has the nerve to admit "the riders reaction not to race was understandable" and "The track was unraceable" ... meanwhile, as "uk martin" has noted above, the SCB referee is deemed to be in control of the meeting (rather than the home promotion) for the final 2-hours before its commencement, yet seemingly despite all the mutterings and misgivings of the previous few days, no attempt appears to have been made to hold back any crowd admittance, etc. (No wonder the BSPA have swiftly distanced themselves from either Belle Vue's or the SCB's incompetence, especially if there was any BSPA-generated advice within last week's general damage-limitation hints to call the meeting off.) 4. Perhaps the most frighteningly naive situation of the lot, apparently there's still a chance Saturday's problems can be remedied and, wait for it, tested (yes, tested !! ... why wasn't something similar done towards the end of last week? !!) by 9am/Wednesday to keep the Good Friday meeting alive ... meanwhile, taking a far more realistic view, Sky aren't waiting for that 48-hour miracle and have already wiped next Wednesday's coverage from the track off their listings. Throughout the tortuously long-drawn-out process of the building of this stadium, I've consistently pointed out on this forum that I welcome a new National Speedway Stadium being built, especially in a city with as much heritage for the sport as Manchester, but I have no confidence in the ability of Gordon and Morton to run it anywhere near its full potential. I never expected the clowns to prove that opinion so spectacularly accurate before the first competitive lap at the stadium has even taken place !!

I thought greyhound racing's attitude to Galliard Homes' grip on the Greyhound Racing Association (and, therefore, the great likelihood of as many dwellings as possible being built on the stadium site) was hopelessly naive. But at least that sport's been campaigning about the situation for a few years even if it's often looked like doomed campaigning. So how come the stock car lobby are only just cottoning on to the gravity of the whole saga and urgently chasing 10,000 signatures to their petition ? !! ... where was any noise from this lobby when, last February, the greyhound industry (plenty of representatives of the Irish breeding/training angles included) descended on London's City Hall for a widely-praised "Show of Passion" to keep their activity going at Wimbledon Stadium ? !! That's a hell of an achievement by the GRA landlords if they've managed to keep the stock car mob so unaware of the overall situation for so long.

Thanks for your kind words Salty. Yes, it used to be chaotic at the Durnsford Road traffic lights but in those days no-one had yet invented the concept of event-day parking zones as an occasional alternative to permanently-enforced parking zones so I'm sure there'll be at least a quarter-mile ban on matchday parking unless you're a local resident and that will cause more widespread but stodgy traffic instead of a smaller gridlock. Once it became clear the Greyhound Racing Association were in the grip of Galliard Homes, the rest of the greyhound industry has been dreadfully naive in hoping its passionate campaigning to keep the dog track open would work. Instead, at a much earlier stage, that industry should have regarded any remaining time at Wimbledon as a bonus and channelled much more of its energy into identifying a site upon which it could build a 21st century home for that sport relatively near to London ... not easy, I accept, given land prices in that area but there are a few brown-field sites that are never likely to be deemed suitable for housing, notably the large sweep of marshland on the border of the Sutton and Croydon boroughs that I've mentioned in this thread before which was historically the sewage zone for the whole of South London (hence its unsuitability for permanent living across its entire space for health reasons but still realistic to purify a chunk of it for commercial use or leisure facilities). At least in this respect, the original Wimbledon FC did the right thing by facing up quickly and realistically around 1990 about how impossible it would be for them to keep staging top-flight football at their end of Plough Lane although I doubt anyone involved at the time would have predicted the Milton Keynes, Surrey non-league and Kingstonian elements of what's followed.

Local politicians in London with a long memory won't have forgotten what happened in the 1990 Greenwich borough elections when enough Charlton Athletic fans stood for the Voice Of The Valley party to field a full set of candidates in protest that the council wasn't helping that football club anywhere near as much as it should have been to restore their famous old ground, thus forcing at least a 6th season of renting Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park for home games (in the end, after that 6th Charlton season borrowing Selhurst, Wimbledon became the new Selhurst tenants so Charlton switched to West Ham's Upon Park for a season and the next autumn before The Valley reopened in December 1992). . Incredibly, VOTV collected nearly 15,000 votes and it remains one of the very few examples of a party not remotely interested in day-to-day politics having a big impact on an election because although none of the VOTV candidates won a council seat, their presence on the ballot paper and the hefty number of votes they drained from established councillors clearly had the decisive swing in ousting at least 2 big local names. Add that Charlton/Greenwich example to any political shame in Merton for the 1980's treatment of Wimbledon FC plus the increasing desperation of nearly any council to boost its council tax revenues regardless of the consequences and any common sense arguments about the ever-increasing risks of flooding don't stand a chance. Car boot sales don't generate council tax revenue while clogging up the traffic ... apartments do generate council tax revenue while clogging up the traffic ... spot the subtle difference ? !! And remember, floods only happen "once in a lifetime" long after the councillors who've increased the risk of them are no longer serving insde the council chamber ... try explaining that to the folk in Carlisle who've just had their 3rd "flood of a lifetime" during the 21st century (2005, 2009 and last week) !!

Difficult to sum up the turbulent history of the original Wimbledon FC (and particularly its home ground at the west end of Plough Lane) in just a few paragraphs for a forum like this, but here goes ... the key thing about viability is that top-division football at that original ground became ever more impossible whereas at least lower-division football on the bigger site of the current Wimbledon Stadium would be much more realistic. (If you google-map that area, the old football ground took up just the land hemmed inside the junction of Durnsford Road and Plough Lane to the west of the River Wandle where the 4 apartment blocks parallel to each other now stand) Just when the club was beginning its rapid rise through the divisions (4th-Div winners 1983, 3rd Div runners-up '84 and 2nd Div promotion '86), a previous and much less football-friendly edition of Merton Council reckoned it could still buy back that ground for its late-1950's rateable value of only £8,200 thanks to an agreement struck in that earlier time when it had helped to stabilise the club's finances. That harsh attitude from the 1980's council meant Wimbledon FC were already trying to find a new home even before the all-seater requirements of football's Taylor Report would have left Plough Lane with only about 6,000 as its all-seater capacity (it was roughly double that while terracing remained allowed) ... it also meant there were plenty of supporters and club officials who would have preferred nothing to do with any civic parade celebrating the 1988 FA Cup triumph given they felt the council didn't deserve any glow from the football club's glory. A nearby site sketched out as the Wandle Valley Stadium seating 20,000 would have doubled up as Wimbledon's new football ground plus an upgrade for the 15,000-capacity Crystal Palace arena a few miles away that was long established as London's premier athletics venue ... it would have been the same size as the recently defunct Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield that was built at much the same time for that city's hosting of the 1991 World Student Games. But Wandle Valley never got going, partly because its multi-sport and community aspects that were vital to its overall viability required its football-field to be an artificial surface at just the time the Football League was banning such pitches after so many sides hated QPR's plastic surface at Loftus Road. Hence why Wimbledon became the 2nd football club (immediately after Charlton's ground-sharing spell at Crystal Palace) to rent Selhurst Park for home games, starting in August 1991 because terracing was only allowed to remain in use by then in the top 2 divisions providing you could prove how your existing ground would become all-seater or you clearly had a new all-seater home on the horizon. (That's why Sunderland were still allowed to use terracing at Roker Park as late as the 1996-97 Premiership season, albeit limited in capacity to only the number of seats that particular terracing could house, because they repeatedly showed successfully that they were on their way, firstly to a site next to Nissan's factory that was never used because it was trumped by the fresh availability of the former Wearmouth Colliery that did become the Stadium of Light ) As long as Wimbledon stayed in the top-flight, it was financially viable for them to rent Selhurst Park simply thanks to the combination of tv-money and huge numbers of away fans regularly outnumbering the Dons fans. All sorts of projects to give Wimbledon FC a new home were mooted but whether they were local or wildly distant (some of you might remember moving them to Dublin to create every away fan's jolly-trip of the season got stacks of media coverage), nothing emerged and their relegation from the Premier League in May 2000 after 14 top-level seasons wrecked the financial balancing act. It wasn't long before rock-promoter Pete Winkleman's plan to relocate them to Milton Keynes became easily the most practical but also hugely controversial way to prop up that version of Wimbledon FC at roughly the level it was holding within the league pyramid (as it's turned out, it's only this season after several near-misses that MK Dons are finally playing in what's now the Championship on their own merit) ... once that move was given the football authorities' blessing, that's when the current AFC Wimbledon was formed in 2002 by the supporters appalled at the 60-mile move north, initially taking a couple of thousand away fans to tiny non-league grounds in Surrey that often didn't have even 100 home fans !! Looking forward, Dagenham & Redbridge would be as good an example as any other London club of how a lower-league side can be viable in the capital despite the mega-millions of the bigger clubs ... that club's roots belong to 4 different historically famous non-league East London sides because Leytonstone merged with Ilford and then further merged with Walthamstow Avenue to create Redbridge Forest before yet another merger with Dagenham created the current club which remains on Dagenham's traditional ground but whose upgrading to top non-league and then Football League standard was reliant on Redbridge's financial clout. AFC Wimbledon have shown in recent seasons they have the equivalent of Redbridge's financial clout but they haven't had the equivalent of Dagenham's traditional ground within Wimbledon's geographical area ... meanwhile, it's clear there's a current mood within many of Merton's councillors that returning the modern local successors to Wimbledon FC into the borough will be a political apology for the council's 1980's attitude. And then, of course, there's the financial side in council tax revenue that a rectangular sporting floorspace surrounded by rectangular stands is far easier for developers to build a greater number of apartments into the remaining space compared to the oval-shaped (and bigger) sporting floorspace that any combination of greyhounds, speedway or stock cars require ... as I've pointed out on this thread before, even as big a rectangular sporting floorspace as Cardiff's Millennium Stadium houses only a 285-metre speedway track for its Grand Prix whereas any greyhound development at Wimbledon would have wanted to stay close to the current 414-metre dog track. All of which helps explain why Merton Council's so overwhelmingly voted for the football plan despite Wandsworth Council's continuing (and very justifiable) concern that any flood management written into this football plan could shift the risk of the River Wandle bursting its banks further downstream into the remaining mile of that river that's entirely within Wandsworth's boundaries before it flows into the Thames close to Wandsworth town centre.

Hold on a minute, you ignorant buffoon. Anyone with even a modest knowledge of the Wimbledon Stadium site knows that its north-east chunk is actually inside the London Borough of Wandsworth !! ... the border between Merton and Wandsworth runs through the stadium's land !! Clearly the bulk of the stadium site is within Merton, hence why any planning matters so far have gone through their council operations. But one of the few things everyone can agree upon, be they football, greyhound, speedway fans or councillors or planning officers or developers is that this is a quirky site because of that chunk within Wandsworth which gives that borough's council the chance to at least challenge anything Merton might have appeared to steam-roll through. So any comment from councillors or officials over in Wandsworth does remain relevant until any challenges they choose to make have been debated and decided upon. By all means celebrate football's upper hand at this stage if that's your outlook but you're wonderfully betraying your ignorance by not having a clue about Wandsworth's relevance to the Wimbledon Stadium site.

Perhaps the most significant date currently published for anything to do with this saga is that Sky's upcoming greyhound schedule includes its annual trip for Swindon's biggest dog race of the year, the Arc final, on Wednesday 23rd March 2016. (Swindon picked up the Arc competition from its traditional home at Walthamstow when that track closed in August 2008). This date was published in the last week of September this year, a fortnight before the Swindon Robins staged the extravaganza billed as speedway's farewell to the current stadium. http://www.racingpost.com/news/greyhounds/bags-tv-green-light-for-2016-derby-double-header/1962763/top/ Even if the new stadium does get built, it's just about impossible for it to be ready for that Sky date in just over 4 months' time given it hasn't even begun to be built yet. Hence Sky must be anticipating setting up their cameras for that Arc final around the current dog track rather than a new one ... what's more, they'd be turning up to that current dog track only 2 days before one of the most lucrative days of the year for Elite League speedway because it's a very early Easter in 2016 and so Good Friday crops up on Friday 25th March !! So well done to anyone involved with speedway at Swindon for managing to hype-up and stage a supposed farewell to the current speedway track around a fortnight AFTER it had already been announced elsewhere that Swindon would be welcoming Sky's greyhound coverage during the early stages of the next speedway season !!

Wonderfully ambitious but almost certainly financially reckless to try to run two Kent teams in separate leagues with at least some weeks where there would be both a Monday and a Friday meeting. It's easy for loads of enthusiastic supporters to tell promoters that they want to come along to more meetings and therefore love the prospect of cheering on two home teams during the following season. But remember this is an area still getting used again to having any home team to support, never mind two at the same track. When that following season actually takes place, it soon becomes obvious that relatively few supporters have both enough time and enough money to actually turn up to all those meetings they told the promoters the previous autumn they'd love to attend !! Instead, you'll find plenty of supporters with enough time to attend all the meetings but not enough spare cash to fund all of them ... and plenty of supporters who can pay for all the meetings but whose work/life balance limits them to fitting only one home meeting into each week plus the very occasional second meeting in any week if it's a big enough attraction. Trouble is, by the time the promoters yet again discover the sequence I've just described, they're committed to the costs of staging all those meetings those supporters told them they'd love to attend only to find the cash or time obstacles in due course !! Even Matt Ford couldn't justify the cost of running the Bournemouth Buccaneers as a second home team when the huge Poole fan base didn't turn up in anything like enough numbers for National League action. Coventry and King's Lynn deserve huge praise for continuing to run EL and NL teams simultaneously while Rye House have had their "on-off" history of combining PL-Rockets and NL-Raiders but the sport's littered with clubs (or an ex-club) who found out painfully that it doesn't pay to host twin teams ... see any of Edinburgh, Newcastle, Newport, Plymouth, Poole, Redcar, Scunthorpe, Sheffield or Swindon who've all made great efforts to add a second home team to their respective clubs over the past 15 years but all ended up with the harsh financial reality of continuing only one home team despite often having far longer developed current fan bases than the Kent operation currently holds. PS ... what prize do I win for relevantly chucking Matt Ford's name into this thread ? !!

Highly unlikely that any local-TV would show the impact with the airfence even if it was available. However, what turns out to be the case here is that ReRun's camera has captured Josh challenging Lewis but once there's been contact, that camera's stayed on Josh falling onto the track plus Craig Cook's commendably swift laydown that's at the perfect angle for that camera shot behind Josh's tumble ... meanwhile, all you see of Lewis and his machinery after the contact is the pair of them rapidly veering off the left-edge of the screen well before the horrible impact. Hence, I can understand the footage being shown to illustrate how the situation developed while still maintaining the dignity of not showing the most horrific aspect. Had the camera stayed on Lewis rather than Josh, I'd hope any TV-newsroom would halt the footage once it's clear where Lewis is heading after the contact but still well before the impact.

Lunchtime Look East led with Lewis's plight with their sports reporter James Burridge reporting from inside the Showground complex but not inside the track. In terms of the news agenda, there was nothing wrong with Look North grouping together several on-going crime stories at the top of their order before moving onto the speedway crash ... it was just that the rest of Look East's bulletin looked like they had nothing to rival the latest court appearance of Sunderland footballer Adam Johnson or the Cumbrian music festival drugs story that's featured prominently since Friday so that's simply why the two regions placed the same story differently within their schedule. Plans were being sketched out last night and early today to co-ordinate any BBC regional coverage between the Newcastle and Norwich newsrooms because while Lewis was riding yesterday for a Look North team, it's the Look East area that covers all of his home village, his Elite League team, the crash venue and the hospital now caring for him ... ReRun Productions (yesterday's meeting-DVD company) and GRT Media (plenty of recent footage of Lewis's Diamonds action) were immediately included in those plans. For those elsewhere in the UK not used to these particular regional news bulletins, it's Sky-955 for the North East & Cumbria edition of Look North made in Newcastle (not 956 for the Yorkshire edition from Leeds or 957 for the Yorks/Lincs edition from Hull) ... both the eastern (961) and western (962) halves of Look East had the same lunchtime bulletin but I'm not sure if they still split part/all of their 6.30pm programme. Meanwhile, best wishes to Lewis and his family/friends in such difficult times.

That matches up with my understanding that the Devils' link to Colin Hill's legacy only dates from former Exeter team manager David Short becoming heavily involved at Plymouth once Mike Bowden was no longer in charge.

There might have been some sort of similar rule in operation around the late 1970's (my involvement only goes back as far as 1988) but in more recent seasons until this year, Swedish riders missing Tuesday or Thursday action over here for domestic Elit or Allsvenskan action back in their homeland haven't had guest or rider replacement facilities in this country. It's why Workington were always so keen to be one of the Isle of Wight's earliest League visitors in late-April when Daniel Nermark was in the Comets' line-up so that they could get their only Tuesday away-meeting out of the way before his Elit schedule began in early-May.