arnieg

I was merely rebutting your statement that no other sports would have unbalanced fixture lists. I have in fact cited all five major American sports. (In US culture 'major sport' has a well understood meaning: baseball, American football, (ice) Hockey and Basketball. Some would add Soccer as MLS attendances are similar to the NBA. Incidentally lacrosse is the number six team sport in the States.) You seem to be introducing the arguments about weather and stadium availability at a rather late stage, and they don't alter the fact that your original posting was wrong. BTW I have been to a rained-off baseball match (at New Camden Yard in Baltimore). We saw five of the nine innings before it p*ssed down. And what they do in mlb is come back (two months later in this case) and play the remaining four innings even though the teams are different! Imagine what speedway fans would say if the BSPA proposed that after being rained-off after six races the match should be continued three months later with changed line-ups? No idea - I have no interest in cricket

I suggest you go and look at archive copies of the national newspapers from any part of the twentieth century before 1993 - they all seem to take cricket quite seriously (and First class county cricket consisted of 17 counties from 1921 to 1993 - considerably more than 8) Basketball (from Wikipedia): During the regular season, each team plays 82 games, 41 each home and away. A team faces opponents in its own division four times a year (16 games). Each team plays six of the teams from the other two divisions in its conference four times (24 games), and the remaining four teams three times (12 games). Finally, each team plays all the teams in the other conference twice apiece (30 games). This asymmetrical structure means the strength of schedule will vary between teams (but not as significantly as the NFL or MLB). Over five seasons, each team will have played 80 games against their division (20 games against each opponent, 10 at home, 10 on the road), 180 games against the rest of their conference (18 games against each opponent, 9 at home, 9 on the road), and 150 games against the other conference (10 games against each team, 5 at home, 5 on the road). Ice Hockey (also from wiki): In the regular season, each team plays 82 games: 41 games each of home and road. Eastern teams play 30 games in its own geographic division— four or five against each one of their seven other divisional opponents—and 24 games against the eight remaining non-divisional intra-conference opponents—three games against every team in the other division of its conference. Western teams play 28 or 29 games in its own geographic division-four or five against each one of their six other divisional opponents-and 21 or 22 games against the seven remaining non-divisional intra-conference opponents-three games against every team in the other division of its conference, with one cross-division intra-conference match-up occurring in four games (these are the teams that play only 28 intra-division games in a given season, in 2013–14 those teams are Colorado and San Jose). All teams play every team in the other conference twice-home and road. Soccer (wiki): Major League Soccer's regular season runs from March to October with its 19 teams playing 34 games in an unbalanced schedule That's a pretty full list of major US sports - all having asymmetric schedules

Cricket until 1993All American major professional sports

And all the other sports where it happens

Barry Stephenson is the compiler

honourable mention to Rob Shuttleworth five falls in his first five rides, then a last, and then he won heat 14 to set up the last heat decider

Fantastic meeting (plussed it and just got round to watching it) For comparison went to a Danish Super Liga match earlier this month 100dk (~£11) Big difference in cost structure for Sweden (&prob Denmark too) is the lack of astronomical stadium rental costs

Absolutely. Do you remember the Mike Keen testimonial? Sheeting down and Dag won every race by a straight.

Me too.... But at least I got to see a decent live meeting beforehand - British Youth Champs at Leicester was an excellent meeting

Plenty of examples of foreign teams riding in other leagues: Daugavpils(Latvia), Miskolc(Hungary), Rovno(Ukraine) have all ridden in Polish leagues Ukrainian teams have competed in Russian league Last year an Estonian team participated in the second league in Finland Zarnovicia(Slovakia) have competed in Czech team competitions Finnish teams have competed in lower leagues of Sweden Think there used to be a Dutch team in the German leagues, and Helzod of Belgium are competing in the new Dutch League. I assume the main impact would be separate FIM membership with Team GB becoming England once more

1976 Cradley 40 (John Boulger 21) Reading 38 (Proch 9) The Heathens used r/r for Bernie Persson and under the 1976 rules their was the opportunity for riders to have multiple r/r rides

Yes - the restraint of trade case law goes back to before 1900* - and of course during 1964 Wimbledon promoter (and SCB member) Ronnie Greene took out an injunction to stop Bob Andrews riding for PL Wolverhampton. However the application of commercial/contract law principles to sport has evolved considerably since then and for that reason I think that drawing on 1964 would be of very limited relevance. * just looked at Wikipedia and case law goes back to 1613!!!!!!!!!!

The PL ran black in 1964 - but everyone involved was banned. as a result riders could not compete at ACU grasstrack events (this was why Malcolm simmons elected to go 'white' with National League West Ham instead of continuing with PL Hackney), or compete in the world championship. Australians riding in the PL were banned from riding in their native country by their national federation as a further consequence. Belle Vue were threatened with immediate expulsion from the National League for staging the Provincial League Riders Championship - however by that stage the national League/SCB position was so weak they couldn't follow through with their threat. The bans were lifted as part of the settlement during the 64/65 close season, which was largely on the Provincial League's terms. Whether this has any relevance today is questionable.

These figures are don't look right, but the conclusion certainly is! The 1987 average wage was £8,140 ( £17,857 in 2010 prices). The current figure is around £24,000. That's a factor of three increase which would make the equivalent admission fee £9 (the data goes up to 2010, so that would probably be £10 by 2013). So admission prices have gone up way faster than average earnings If they had gone up in line with inflation the admission price would be just : £ 7.50 Source: http://www.measuringworth.com/ukearncpi/

From 'Tears and Glory' 1976 chapter: Bernie Leigh also upped his average by over a point, overtaking Bengt Jansson for the third heat leader spot. His best score of the season came when guesting for Hackney at Hull – 15+1. Sadly he got a duck when he returned to Hull in Racers colours. He did score 12+3 for Racers at Newport – from eight rides. Speedway is littered with bizarre rules, and 1976's rider replacement rule comes into that category. When operating rider replacement the rider immediately above in the averages could take one ride, and any rider with an average below the others. This meant Leigh could have three of Jansson's rider replacement rides, as well as a tactical substitution. He rode in heats: 2, 3, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10 and 12.

I'm a bit confused after looking at the final standings here: http://www.knmv.nl/uploads/archive/2012/KNMV_Speedway_ONK_Totaalstand_2012-10-07.pdf The official results show Robert-jan Bangma competing in the first round and scoring 39 points - these seem to have disappeared and all riders in the B group promoted one place Secondly why are Erwin Werkman's 34 (or should that be 33?) points excluded - shouldn't that only happen to riders competing in all three rounds?

rider to watch - must be Adam Ellis

Abolition of Entertainment tax in the 1957 budget made the economics of running speedway more favourable. Prospective promoters (eg Reg Duval at Liverpool in 1958) found that the established promoters (who had kept the sport going through the lean years) were reluctant to allow new promoters to join organised speedway and benefit from the abolition of entertainment tax. This resulted in pirate meetings at Liverpool, Bradford and Cradley in 1959. The first two were promoted by Mike Parker a Manchester based midget car driver. All three tracks had mixed programmes of bikes and midgets. MP was the driving force behind the formation of the PL. He got together a group of prospective promoters from various sources the northern pirate tracks the amateur tracks involved in the 1959 Southern Area League (in the end only Yarmouth competed in the first PL) tracks that had failed to survive financially in the NL (Rayleigh and Poole) revival of long closed tracks (eg Ian Hoskins at Edinburgh, Charlie Knott at Bristol) Having demonstrated that he wasn't someone to be messed with, Parker opened negotiations with the Speedway Control Board with a view to running the new league under the control of the SCB. Although not without the odd hitch the PL plan came to fruition. There are some interesting articles on www.speedwayplus.com about this episode in spedway's history.

I too was on the site yesterday morning, looking at the ice speedway results from 2012. They too now appear to be hiding. Can you link me to them?

Is there a Kaupunki Cup result missing? All the sites with info on the Kaup Cup, including this thread, seem to have details of 7 meetings, but the final league table implies that there were 8 meetings. The fixture list at the start of the thread suggests that there should have been a meeting in mid August?

All the PL trophies went to different teams - a very unusual event with so many trophies on offer League - Scunthorpe Cup - Newcastle League Cup - Somerset Fours - Berwick Pairs - Workington Individual - Craig Cook of Edinburgh

Not strictly 2013 I know but I was looking at past results from Sweden and I couldn't find 2011 results current results are on: http://www.svemo.se/sv/Grenar/Speedway/ and it links to http://speedwayhistorik.svemo.se/ for archives covering 2002-2010. Are the 2011 results hidden somewhere on the SVEMO site? (Note not all the info particularly the 80cc results are on aktuellspeedway)

hope your son is OK based on last night's performance the Diamonds should be OK. The only department in which Ipswich excelled last night was in getting a meeting on in attrocious conditions.

Er no. .... wouldn't Ales Dryml, Leon Madsen, Troy Batchelor and the winner of a run-off between Andersen, Ljung, Vaculik and Buczkowski be there. (I know in practice that with no wild cards the GP challenge field might look a bit different - but the point remains a valid one.