Grachan

Why blame the fact that she is female for a decision like that? Do you think that every female watching that thought that Thomsen was at fault?

Bewley is so frustrating. If he could find consistency he could really challenge for the title - but I guess everyone already knows that.

A lot of empty seats.

To be fair, it's actually not easy to only show 2 riders when they are racing 3 abreast.

Yes. I was thinking the same thing. How many times have they cut to show a single rider when there's a good race going on that you're trying to follow?

I agree, which is part of the frustration of it all.

Plus Poland, Chechia, Latvia. Go Egon!

Is he though? How can you really tell when there is nobody else who seems capable of properly challenging him and genuinely putting him under pressure? Nobody else has the consistency. World number 2 Robert Lambert, for example, ended up with 3 points last night. If you look through history, the great champions always had someone pushing them. Funding, Briggs, Olsen and Mauger all had each other. Nielsen and Gundersen had each other. Rickardsson had Pedersen, Crump, Hancock, Adams etc. Since Zmarzlik started winning World Championships, the one rider to properly challenge him was Artem Laguta - and Laguta won and was promptly removed from the series. Zmarzlik's most consistent challenger is probably Lindgren, who is not really a genuine rival. Someone needs to step up to the plate to make this interesting. Can Kurtz do that? I'm not convinced. Holder maybe? It's a shame Bartosz can't be transported into another era so we could really see how good he is. To be honest, if you could do that and transport someone like Egon Muller into the modern series, my guess is you'd see Muller winning multiple World Championships and being hailed as a contender for the greatest of all time.

Interesting to see a Wales v England women's 6 Nations rugby match on tv at the moment. The crowd looks a lot smaller than for the speedway gps, yet it is on at the Millenium Stadium and shown on Prime time BBC.

That's a shame. It was a very good website, and one I often looked at to find average etc.

Reading's supposed new stadium was touted as being a "racino" - a speedway track and casino combined.

I remember going to a Reading Press and Practice day and they still only had half a team signed. They won the league that year. (Memory is a bit hazy, but I think they signed Todd Wiltshire between then and the opening fixture).

I love the bit where he picks up so much speed going into the bend that you hear the crowd let out a gasp.

I went to Amsterdam and it wasn't good. The problem wasn't the fact that it was 2 days or the quality of the racing, it was that - apart from the British section on bend 2 - the stadium was practically empty. Cardiff, sadly, was starting to go the same way so was bound to get dropped soon. This is yet another sign of the decline of the sport in this country. If the GP is going to be held at a league track, though, Belle Vue is the best choice. The GP will continue to decline, at least until all the World's best riders are allowed to ride in it. It's pretty meaningless at the moment. I can also say that, as one of many people who no longer have a home track to support, interest in the sport itself gradually fades away as the years pass. Time is a great healer.

I think this is sad, but inevitable. Last time I went to Cardiff the crowd was shocking, and with teams shutting down and the leagues shrinking, so the number of people going will also shrink. Cardiff never sold out, but it used to be pretty full until recently. Now there were more empty seats than occupied ones. GP now back to when it was held at places like Coventry and Hackney. Next thing we'll be back to one- off World Finals in Poland. Only positive about this is the Belle Vue track, but I'm not even convinced they can fill the stadium for 2 nights.