HenryW

This is what I don't understand about going to this stadium...it's small. I can understand using temporary tracks to get into large stadiums but not this one...Given it also has no roof this makes no sense at all.

There was always a risk this would happen but Peterborough wouldn't have been certain until the Danish teams picked their riders for this date...Denmark use a squad system so it's never certain if a rider will be racing or not...and of course they only just added Emil to their own team when the Thorsell signing was refused.

The Oxford dictionary defines a legend as An extremely famous or notorious person, especially in a particular field. Nicki seems to fit that definition just fine. Do you really think that people will boo Darcy when he returns? I would imagine that the number who would do this would be very small indeed.

To be fair, he failed a test one time. That doesn't mean that he was never over the limit at other meetings, just that he wasn't tested at those ones. There were a good few people telling us that he didn't look like he was under the influence at all in Daugavpils and yet he was well over the limit...Maybe he has never raced like that before or maybe he regularly did...We will never know. As I have said many times before, I don't understand why riders aren't routinely tested before EVERY meeting. It's cheap, quick and easy to carry out a breath test. Why is it only being done randomly for a few riders in a few meetings? Test every rider at every meeting. If they are over the limit, they are out the meeting but can race the next day if they are sober again...Lengthy bans like Darcy has suffered wouldn't be needed if everyone was tested at every meeting. The length of ban is being used as a deterrent, and that makes sense for drug tests which are more expensive and time consuming to carry out, but makes no sense for alcohol.

Having now seen the incident that took PK out the meeting in Riga, I think I owe him an apology for this comment. That was definitely not his fault and I don't understand how Loktaev wasn't excluded for that one...

It's the same most years...you usually get 1 decent qualifier at most and the others are fairly uninspiring.

Vaculik and Jepsen Jensen both out...Didn't see that coming. Other than maybe Piotr Pawlicki I don't think there is anything more exciting coming out of this meeting compared to the Riga one.

According to SportoweFakty he was 7th after all riders had completed 4 races. Maybe they made a mistake with that.

Surely he is still in the top 7 even after that...

Kildemand would be a good permanent addition to the series if he could ever learn to stay on his bike in these events.

Thought that myself but gate 3 didn't deliver much during the meeting. I guess he got a really bad start there.

One early year we ended up with tickets for the bottom tier on the home straight (no idea how) and that was terrible, so not sure I would say "nowhere is bad" We didn't even wait for the first race, just wandered upstairs and got ourselves a great view from the top tier instead.

He certainly seemed to have lots of pace in his engines tonight...even in the final he looked the fastest but Nicki was too smart for him... Has there been a split between Emil and Ash? Or maybe going forward the World Championship will become an event that loses value and Emil's efforts in the European Championship will become more valuable than we might think just now...

Imagine it's the World Cup Final in Poland, the biggest speedway Nation around. After 7 races the Danes are 6 points behind, play the joker and Nicki Pedersen scores 6 points. Come the end of the meeting and Denmark win by 1 point. Denmark have an unfair advantage because they are allowed to ride for 3 extra points. Poland are at a disadvantage because they are winning. In "Normal Play" Poland outscore Denmark, but Denmark are rewarded for being behind. You could have seen it all happen in Bydgoszcz last year and the joker remained....

Did the twitter aftermath of the bust up between Greg and Nicki in Sweden yesterday give a little hint as to who really wanted the meeting off in Warsaw? Nicki Pedersen ‏@nickipedersenDK @GregHancock45 Stop cry it didnt hurt when running after me 😂 Thank yourself for this crash. Dont ask my help again like you did in Warsaw

There were plenty of people on this forum who stated just how pointless this rule was as soon as it was announced. Tatum had a regular whinge on TV about riders going back to the pits so they wrote a stupid rule to stop them going back to the pits but didn't do anything about speeding things up which was the real requirement. What it needed was a rule to say that after an unsatisfactory start a new time limit would start immediately...ideally something less than the standard 2 minutes...make it 1 minute or 30 seconds and let the riders do what they want in that time.

Ref not having a good meeting...has he got any decisions right so far?

But who will tell you when teams are almost far enough behind to play a joker

Yeah. Good luck with that.Eurosport 2 hour "highlights" normally involve showing the first half hour "as live" then jumping to the last hour and a half "as live" and just missing out everything in between. Maybe they will make more effort today but I wouldn't count on it.

The stadium location was just North of where the Excel Arena is now. Several of the residential streets that were built on the site were named after speedway riders, such as Young Road and Wilkinson Road. If you have the desktop version of Google Earth you can view aerial imagery from 1945, showing the stadium, with the current streets overlayed on it.

I guess this means all the Polish fixtures will be cancelled and so the Russians no longer have any punishment! Edit - Looks like june01 beat me to it with that point :-)

FIM quick to act on this one...still waiting to hear what they are doing about the 16 riders that refused to race in Warsaw!

Not sure about the relevance of that last line. There would be very little point in organising test matches in the UK. It is on foreign shale that the riders need to get more experience. It would also be good to get international experience early. Under 18 and Under 21 test matches abroad would be particularly useful...and maybe actually getting some coaching for young lads. The number of young Brits that have bizarre racing styles that are only hampering them is unbelievable.

I have to say that from the 3rd turn it looked quite clear that Sam simply dived in and wiped out Rohan...and everyone around me was just as surprised as I was when Rohan was excluded. If Cameron Heeps is back for the cup matches we could be in some trouble. The 2 points that R/R delivered last night are nothing like what he would surely score at the Dale and I am not sure that Danny King would score as low again....

What's more amazing is that every fan agreed on it back in 2006 as well, but then after the 2007 final they decided to get rid of the reserves again. That was all part of the slow destruction of the best tournament that speedway had seen for many years. When BSI first took over the SWC they created a great tournament and for me it was the high point of the speedway season for a good few years, but it has slowly been turned into a complete waste of time. The change to 4 man teams and 20 heat matches was bad....the seeding of the hosts to the final was even worse... A once great week of speedway was quickly turned into a week of relatively predictable results and TV boredom.