uk_martin

I think that you will find that Tony Mole, Len Silver, CVS, Matt Ford etc etc encounter exactly these considerations as well. Surely though if £10 speedway is such a great idea, you'll be able to convince a backer (try the Dragons Den) as you're convinced that the profits will roll in, helping you to pay for the RBS recovery etc etc out of your Corporation Tax and Income Tax payments... Heck, by the end of it, you could even be accused on BSF of being a greedy money grabbing so and so.

Not in the slightest. Check out (wikipedia for example) what economists call "opportunity cost" - measuring the cost of an item in terms of the foregone alternative. It doesn't matter what the tax on beer is. What matters is, that in Britain, speedway costs about 5 pints of beer and in Poland speedway costs 12 pints of beer. Also worth noting that the average salary for a citizen of (for example) Gorzow and Zielona Gora, (where the best crowds are to be found) is about £800 per month.(Gross) Now work out the cost of speedway in terms of the proportion of monthly earnings and then do the comparison to the UK.

In a country where a pint of quality beer is about £1, by your logic it costs 12 pints of beer to see a Polish speedway meeting. That's at least twice as much as it costs in Britain.

No flak. Just an idea. Word is that Tony Mole is about to reopen Bradford. Why not everyone on BSF who agrees with the "Speedway fo a Tenner" idea club together as a consortium and go into partnership with Tony Mole, and put your own money where your mouths are? Bradford could then be the £10 Team you all want. If they succeed then you will be hero's and will show the way to everyone else.

Or go wearing your British team colours. I was at ZG yesterday wearing my Brummies shirt. The novelty value opened a few conversations with some nice friendly people and made for a very happy time.

interesting article here about punishments handed out to two Polish teams after last week's farce over there...divide the amounts of the fines by 5 to give a rough sterling equivalent - http://www.sportowefakty.pl/zuzel/362981/na-moj-znak-dajemy-surowe-kary-dla-pge-marmy-rzeszow-i-fogo-unii-leszno

Who gets the British Cardiff wildcard is down to one thing and one thing only...who gets most bums on seats. Forget romantic notions about who is on form, and who deserves it. And forget any fanciful ideas about it ever being linked in to the British final again. BSI are a business and they will care only about who will draw the crowd in and generate the most cash for them. As for the rest of the SGP series, my guess is that there won't be any more "token Brits" just for the sake of it. Any British rider who wants to get into the SGP series will have to be there on merit, either in Tai's case by being in the top 8, or in any other case by making it through the qualifiers. Relationships between BSI and BSPA are such that British Speedway is owed NO favours any more.

Don't think that this is quite the right web forum to be discussing that sort of thing... Any more suggestions like that and you'll have GCHQ monitoring your internet traffic!

They shouldn't be. Images are usually linked to third party sites. For that reason, the speed of the BSF server isn't affected. You might be reduced to the speed of the slowest server when viewing a page that includes these images, but only on pages that include these images. i.e. it will take as long as it does to download the images off the third party server. The rest of BSF will be unaffected. IF BSF is running slowly it will be down to other factors, or maybe it will be down to your connection with your ISP.

Communism beats Capitalism 6-3 Probably Eurosport's way of saying, "If Great Britain wants to be isolationist, let it be isolated!!

8 riders qualify as of right, the rest of the line-up for 2014 will be down to the qualifiers and to BSI. I would hardly think that those who tread the podiums will be in much danger of not getting wild cards if nothing else. Added to which, KK is quite capable of making up 1 point per meeting on the old men of the sport. Wouldn't be surprised to see Gollob and Hancock retire at the end of this campaign anyway, so that's two of the top 8 that won't be back and whose places will need to be filled. I would be majorly surprised if KK wasn't in the SGP's in 2014

Not far off the mark there. As I understand it, the BSPA didn't want to field a GB team as it would cost them money to effectively fund a rival promotions agency's event. The BSPA still view British Speedway and especially the Elite League as the most important speedway tournament in the world. Now that there is more money, and more television and more top riders in Poland and Sweden, there is an ever increasing amount of sulking going on. As has been seen, no British rider has been entered into the European Championships, and no quarter given to teams who field foreigners who have been entered into the "Euro's" by their parent federations. The BSPA are withdrawing into their shells, and the other speedway promotions companies are distancing themselves from the BSPA. Witness BSI's decision to nominate their own wild card, and contract Chris Harris as far back as last November, to the Cardiff GP. If truth be known, none of the British riders who did their damnest were ever in with a sniff of Cardiff. It was such a massive game of smoke and mirrors to give the impression that the British Championships mattered that I'm surprised that it hasn't stirred up more controversy than it did. The money is in Poland, the television coverage is in Poland, so if the Poles (One Sport etc) decide to run their own show, who can stop them? BSI are completely independent of the BSPA and the Cardiff SGP didn't even get much of a mention or any promotion by the BSPA (their web site, or any other means), so much of a sulk was had about it. British Speedway and the British Championships is now isolated in World speedway terms. It won't be long before the top British riders will have decisions to make about whether they want to continue as bigish fish in a shrinking pool, or if they want to up-sticks and move their lot onto the continent, like others have in the past.

What is this event all about? It's calling itself the Speedway World Championship FFS and it looks to have FIM backing. I may have thought that it was an SGP Qualifier or something, but why would Krzyszpy Kzakesz be in a qualifier for an event that he is secure in already? Any thoughts / answers please?

This matter is now up to 50 pages on this thread...it's possible that there will be another 50 to follow thanks to that statement. Don't Belle Vue want this sad episode to end?

Brilliant signing. He and Maksim Bogdanov are at the heart of the Latvian SGP team and I can't wait to see them in action in Czestochowa in July, when his true qualities will be put to the test against Poland Australia and Russia.

Nip into Buildbase and buy some water pipes. They're bound to burst!

Well, ain't everything perfect. The pits are where they are to: 1. keep noise down to the local residents. & 2. the Greyhound Racing Ass wouldn't allow the area where the doggie owners prepare their bow-wows to be given over to anything else. Take a look at the stadium on Google Earth or on Google Maps and you'll see the reason why the stadium can't "build back" It's the GRA's place, We do the best we can as tenants. .

To put some flesh on the bones of this one...the fans were in the ZG stadium because Falubaz returned their allocation of tickets to Gorzow, unsold, because they did not want to comply with the security conditions that were imposed after last years behaviour of the Falubaz fans and the violence between them and the Police after the meeting. The Stal Gorzow management insisted that Falubaz fans would not be allowed to carry bags, bottles, flags or drums into the stadium. In response to the repugnant "Sector Flag" from last year (the one hero-worshipping the wife/murderer of Eduard Jancarz) Falubaz would not be allowed to display another "sector flag". Due to the suspicion that flag-poles were used to smuggle in the smoke flares, all other flags and their poles were to be banned too. The local Police insisted that Falubaz fans would have had to be more thoroughly searched when entering the stadium, for knives etc, including fans having to take their shoes off to prove that they didn't have blades inside them. The Falubaz management were of the opinion that all these restrictions were a breach of their fans' civil liberties and human rights, so told Stal what to do with their tickets, and laid on a TV screen inside their own stadium where the fans could watch the meeting. All the ZG riders had to drive back to ZG to thank their fans at the stadium after the meeting too.

Bjarne Pedersen to Poole in 2014. I hope that Michael Jepsen Jensen signs for the Pirates too so that his fan club can relocate to the South Coast as well. Poole's BSF presence then would be truly awesome. lol.

No, he's just a wind-up merchant and you let him get to you

Will this thread be discussed in the Speedway Taverna on Wonderful Radio Five One this Friday?

A day's hire charges from the local county cricket club, a low-loader to bring it on...how hard can it be?

"Honour amongst thieves" is the best explanation of that conundrum.

Exactly. As I said somewhere else. Get rid of everyone unfit to run the sport and you won't have a sport left at all.

2010 - Birmingham were going through an unbeatable run, and the once mighty Kings Lynn were on a wobble (even at full strength)...so... "as luck would have it" it was discovered 5 days before the KL v Brummies fixture that the Norfolk Arena floodlights had had a control panel failure! And because it was such an old and obsolescent piece of kit, to get the spare parts and an electrician with the appropriate skills would take at least 6 days. Just like you knew it would, eh? Only those who were born yesterday bought into the story, but of course, in the absence of proof to the contrary, they got off scot free.