moxey63

Don't just take me, look at other examples - like why speedway is in such a state. Deny it all you want. Pointing the finger at me and having to pay to get in just hides the fact that there are hundreds, thousands of others who stopped attending, and the money they paid, unlike me, has gone from the sport. Whether I paid or not is not important. You can be childish and sneer at my posts. But what is important, is the folk who have vanished and the cash they no longer cough up at the turnstiles. My viewpoint now: I would not pay to watch a sport that is so cocked up. And I am not alone.

But, although as you say the racing wasn't always tapes-to-flag in the past, it was more interesting. For starters, we are missing characters. Then we are missing the importance of supporters cheering on someone they have become accustomed to wearing their team colours. I remember in the past how my heart was in my mouth when my favourites came to the line to race for my side. I may as well have been riding the blinking bike, I was that apprehensive. You need the pull of wanting to attend matches to support riders within your team. The riders and the team become part of you. You then don't want to miss it everytime it races. The love of your team then transfers over to when members of it race in individual meetings, like the GPs for example. But when you lose the love of your team, you also lose interest in what are merely then only individuals racing for themselves in the likes of GPs. The racing is probably better now than in the past. But if you, as a fan, haven't got anybody you can associate with through teams not being teams anymore, you lose part of the thing that attracted you in the first place. A good race is a good race. But when you aren't really bothered who wins it, that is the problem. You need to be tribalistic. Otherwise, why bother? In my opinion, fans have become unattached from the importance of team speedway. Teams in speedway nowadays are just like tribute acts for a pop band. They are a novel way of entertainment but only pretend to be the real thing. I used to think it impossible to miss a Belle Vue home match. But then riders began being signed who I knew weren't really Bele Vue. Slowly, as other riders appear who you think the same about, you gradually lose that connection. Hence that is why I can't be attracted to it anymore. The sport could be so great. Me, as a former supporter just clinging on, would love to be able to identify a team as my own, something that makes you look forward to leaving the house to watch, to feel part of every individual in it. I want to see visiting teams with an identity. I want to see two sides who want to win, every rider in them. It isn't the racing.

It isn't a secret that the biggest expense to a rider is their machinery. Surely, instead of talking about following an amateur route, then for domestic speedway there should be restrictions on the amount spent on engine tuning. Surely costs which are saved by the rider could be passed on to the promotion, who then might pass it on to their patrons through the turnstiles.

Bill Barker. Wasn't he the promoter whose house was broken into the day after the Commonwealth Final and the takings were taken?

It's small wonder we're in a state.

It worries me that we have people in charge of clubs who constantly tell us they lost many thousands of pounds last season and yet carry on. Then you hear that Rye House, no better than a second-tier club but foolishly (perhaps)went into the top flight and who closed before finishing last season, offered ridiculous guarantees to riders. These are supposedly businessmen, who have made their fortunes away from speedway. I am not a businessman, but I wouldn 't even buy a season ticket in today's speedway climate. Yet the custodians of our sport can't wait to tell us how much they lost.

The fun has gone out of speedway. Why bother to leave the house to attend the track to cheer on boys who have as much commitment to your team as the next land developer who has designs on the venue? Not to mention spending nearly £20 admission in the hope you won't be kept waiting in the cold for two hours or more for 15 minutes of action. Youngsters have a variety of other things to do nowadays so you can't really expect to lure kids and expect them to wait 10 minutes until the next race. If we don't lower our aims and commit to having a league set up which favours the old art of team speedway rather than tinkering with rules to allow riders a decent living in whatever division that can accommodate them, we are done. Speedway is primarily a team sport, where riders turn out in the colours for those on the terraces. That has been completely lost in modern-day speedway. It is important now just to fix the riders up with enough dates in their diary to make a living. The riders are being put ahead of the fans. One night during the 90s I realised that riders I had grew up supporting actually began to feel they were doing the fans some kind of favour. It was the night one particular meeting was held up for around 45 minutes because some competitors had been delayed in Sweden from the night before. Any other entertainment business would have made sure it didn't happen again. But it has, again and again. When you feel that the team you used to glow red-faced just cheering on hasn't anybody in it who would commit the same because it's just a job, and they have a short career, I suppose you can point to the start of speedway's latest death threat. Speedway should make up its mind. Either return it to a team sport - banish the double up and down farce - and give a reason for fans to return, a love for a team of seven of their own riders. Otherwise, what does it exist for?

But how? I'd reckon four out of five people are introduced to the sport by family or friends. When the time comes that family and friends decide they can no longer follow the sport, who is there to introduce the next generation? Speedway is an exciting spectacle, but a kid soon gets bored of seeing what seems like the same race they have just watched. Much of speedway's attraction is the filling in of a programme. Perhaps an idea would be to introduce it as part of a school's maths lesson and invite kids from local schools in class numbers. I was introduced by friends, got bored after a few races, but then was shown what a programme was like to fill in. Keeping scores and watching racing are important.

I am not blaming the riders. I would have loved to have raced speedway but wouldn't race my push bike without brakes let alone a 500cc driven machine. But you can't use the reason they are paid more than the sport can afford simply because it's a short career. The state pension age is now 67 or something, so even a rider who retires at 40 can expect to work another two and half decades. I blame a lot of speedway's current plight down to being weak and allowing riders to have too much leeway.

Talking about speedway's demise and what needs to be done has been over-indulged. I for one feel like I did on Christmas Day night after all that chocolate and stuff. There is no more to say. Ideas have been put across but the few people who are steering the sport know best.

I suppose eight years of Tory austerity may be partly to blame for speedway's present state. Indeed, I once read an article that speedway always blossoms when Labour is in power, so come on Jeremey Corbyn! When I read that one long-standing rider has never had a job outside of Speedway, I realised some participants treat is as though it were football. It is a small time sport that should be organised that way. The average speedway fan has to put aside a large slice of his monthly wage to attend the weekly home match and has to cut their cloth when necessary. I know riders deserve more and risk their lives, but so does the fan dashing up and down the motorway to earn a living.

The problem with speedway, which it can't afford, is that riders want to treat it as a full-time occupation while its followers struggle to raise the admission price But the current fan base, in the main, has always introduced most of the new fans.

Costs have been cut... just not on the gate, as shown by the slacking off in numbers. The product has been trimmed, but folk are being asked to cough up even more. Hence, just you and that tumbleweed on the terraces.

Fans through the gates aren't enough to pay the riders, who in turn want to take their money out of the sport by spending on tuners etc. Time to cut costs and at the same time restructuring the whole league set-up. It is speedway's lifeblood.

This is terrible news. If only the speedway doom-and-gloomers had just shut up, and I am termed as one of them, then last season's treble winners would still be alive. If a successful club goes to the wall that carried all before it only four months since... Stop covering your ears and burying your heads. Clubs are here one minute, gone the next. Riders can't commit to one team, fans can't relate to the team because of it. The sport is stuck in a crisis. It proves once again, supporters don't know from one week to the next whether the team they put every emotion behind will be around, never mind what it sends out. Next winter's promoters' AGM can't come quickly enough. Revealing that the black is being withdrawn from yellow helmet covers could have been held back as next winter's big news. Nothing else really changes.

I am only nudging this topic back to life because I have just come across a Speedway Star survey in their new year edition for 1997, a time of another speedway crisis. The survey results showed nothing has been done really to resolve the problems since then of speedway relying on the old brigade of fans to keep the sport going. Two decades ago, just as speedway was benefitting from new public awareness which SKY's coverage of Grand Prix gave, it is interesting to see the feedback of the questions the Star put to fans in the winter of 1996/97: Do you attend speedway less or more than you did five years ago? About the same (39%), more (27%), less (27%), and 6% didn't attend five years ago. Another question: How did you become interested in speedway? Taken by family (62%), recommended by friends (30%). Just eight per cent were attracted by advertising etc. Sixty-four per cent of people said they had introduced new fans in the last two years (1994-96). More than 54% had taken along two-to-four new people. The report revealed that once new fans had been introduced, 80% had become occasional or regular attendees. The main worry was the level of new supporters during the last five years of the survey being compiled? I wonder how that survey would compare to one now. Remember, we have had the good fortune of wall-to-wall live domestic matches over two decades since. How much has that luxury helped or hindered the sport over here?

+The result of Middlesbrough v Edinburgh was changed from 52-44 to 42-44 after Middlesbrough's Shane Parker’s 10 points were deducted after he used an oversized engine. Just found the info in my book, another I compiled, Alan Robertson's British Speedway Leagues 1991-14.

It isn't the racing that's the problem and I really admire the riders and am not dissing them. But the mess that has allowed - especially British speedway - to fall into disrepair. Defend it all you want, as you still attend after all and would be daft if you if you attended something out of routine, so you must still like the modern product and all its off-track circus-type rules that would have many a serious sports supporter swerving away from the nearest speedway track. It simply is not credible. Admit it. But there are still some, only a few I admit, that think the sport is still hunky dory. I am not critical of the riders or racing. But even that is unimportant when you want to follow a sport that is credible. I am not a lone voice. Unfortunately, many of those with similar voices have not bothered to keep in touch with the sport. Even this website has shrunk in numbers and posters, and we ain't talking the last 20 years either. The thread is about SPOTY. Forty years ago this programme ignored various England World Cup-winning side. In 1980, when England achieved the Grand Slam, it again ignored the sport. That was the day of one of speedway's purple periods. The beeb wasn't interested. So why in a day when tracks close faster than my door when trick or treaters turn up, do we feel the beeb is letting the sport down? Most watching it DO NOT know about speedway. Most speedway fans, apart with those who had nothing to do or were visiting their gran's (aww, bless him), do not delude themselves and feel three hours out of their lives to see if the word "speedway" is mentioned is worth it. The sport is in crisis. I know enough about its modern-day fragility to conclude that. Speedway fans though, who still go and support it, are like the child whose pet has been run over by a passing car but refuses to believe it has died, clinging to one last hope because its fur is still moving because of the wind or breeze, there is no sign of life. That is a speedway fan right now. They won't believe it is dead.

I could say what a disgrace BBC is for not giving speedway airspace on SPOTY. But you have to be real. If they didn't give it airtime 40 years ago when the sport was booming, you shouldn't have been fooled into wasting three hours of your lives the other Sunday to watch it, and then pretend to be shocked speedway wasn't on it. Get real. Even fans have got sick to the teeth of it and the mess it's drifted into to. It isn't just me. It isn't speedway entirely, just the modern form.

Merry Christmas, BWitcher. I know speedway fans are like this, as I was one myself.

Speedway fans have a mentality which wants non-fans to notice the sport. For example, if Tai were mentioned, a speedway fan would get a warm feeling like when he receives a "like" on the BSF or social networks. They know what Tai has achieved, they are fans for god's sake, what he looks like etc. It's a belief, they believe, if SPOTY shows Tai and mentions speedway, the blokes at work or down the pub will see it... and perhaps they might feel the speedway fan not as strange as they did beforehand. Maybe. Just maybe.

So right. It has been a long game of making itself look silly to others. Currently, in 2018, we have a seven month season merely to allow certain clubs to tinker with their scoring prowess and aim towards making the Play-Off, last qualifier or top, it doesn't matter. Just get there with the strongest side the previous seven months of pretending to win all your matches allows while, along the way, you manipulate a stronger side than the team that actually finished top of the table. We all know it doesn't matter a jot after that, as teams that began the season are a mere shadow of the ones all those experts in Speedway Star told us would do this and that in their magnificent pre-season preview. It isn't something new though. In 1999 John Perrin, Belle Vue manager, openly admitted after a poor early-season Craven Shield competition in which the team finished stone bottom of a 10-strong league, that the Aces had used it to purposely drop points so they could bring in new riders on the first set of averages. In 1999 the start of season team building was 40 points maximum but was increased to 45 once the first set of averages came out (in April/May?). Belle Vue brought in Andy Smith and Kaj Laukkanen and ditched Jon Armstrong and Barry Campbell. I bet a lot of teams failed to try their best in early matches, which makes any competition meaningless. If the rules are set to encourage a form of cheating, then cheats will prosper, and serious sports fans and broadcasters will steer clear. That, me Lord, has been its problem for decades. Ivan Mauger not getting a mention on SPOTY is way out of order.

When you begin losing the urge to keep up with the rules, you tend to gradually lose interest. I recall one time at Belle Vue, stood on the terraces, about 2004 when this guy next to me asked when a Golden Double could be deployed in the match or something like that. I was stuck. Me, a fan of 30-odd years, couldn't keep track of what was going on with the continuous tinkerings at the AGMs. Reading the forums now about converting averages of certain riders, the same. You can just lose the will to keep up with things. The racing can be brilliant, but you have to keep track and have the appetite to keep up with the rules. If a rule is good in the first place, why change it?

Are your blinkers in Poole colours? Wasn't this a set of fans that because they languished near the foot of the table and looked set to miss out on play-offs, they demanded Matt Ford's head and began to stop attending matches? I'd say that was a scenario where getting a grip was needed. Thankfully, Poole came good and all was well, the fans stayed happy. But, god forbid they have a season when they don't win the play-offs. The entire fabric of British speedway is more important than one particular club. But I suppose that is how we got here, the powerful clubs pulling the strings over the years and letting the weak go and do one.