marko

In the original days the national league I think most of the riders had jobs outside of speedway, most of the teams were almost all British, Arena Essex in 1990 had Martin Goodwin, Rob Tilbury, Troy Pratt, Wayne Garrett rip, Kevin Brice, Simon Wolstenholme and Adrian Stevens, no one doubling up or down, none of those riders rode for anyone else anywhere bar a rare guest appearance. those days are long gone and the current practice of doubling up is not sustainable. should be one biggish league next season, time to start giving the youth a better chance to ride more frequently and on a greater variety of tracks.

Did Edward have a couple of duff tyres? Always worth asking but in his case I suspect it might be down to a loss of concentration? Knows that track so well maybe when it’s not quite normal it catches him out. Not making excuses for him, anyone can have an off day but you would normally expect him to score at least eight from four nigh on every week.

To be fair though, if someone had told me in 1990 that Arena would still be running in 2000 I would not have believed them yet alone 2018, they had a good run given the often uncertainty about their future, and may at some point come back, time will tell.

I recall a time I would go to Hackney one night (now closed) Arena Essex another night (now closed) and sometimes Rye House on a Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon (closed too)

Yet, when a track is in danger of being sold off or left to rot, not a councillor to be seen

Trouble is Cricket has a big appeal to the Asian audience because of India and Pakistan, speedway does not, its not being racist to say that our sport is followed 99.9% by the White British population with quite a high average age group, its a very niche market, especially in a City like Birmingham which has a big ethnic percentage.

Been more cloudy today so hopefully they have been able to put more water on the track, its almost a scandal to have a slick home track and then expect riders like Danny King to perform on it, give the home riders the tools to make the most of home advantage.

How long will it be before we have an unsatisfactory start and all four riders have to return to the pits to change the rear tyre, as well as make clutch adjustments, top up the methonal, change the timing etc etc and four hours later we finally made it to heat 15

My local non league football club charges more on the day at the gate than if you buy tickets online, they actually incentivise buying ahead online, and this is a club that gets not more crowds than your average speedway club gets.

6 team league, good luck with trying to avoid covering the same team two weeks on the trot

ah, that explains it

This must be the least talked about televised meeting in the history of televised meetings, did anyone actually go or watch it? not being funny, but even the most boring of meetings always used to get a few pages of comments if only to decry the lack of entertainment. I don't have Eurosport so did not watch it myself, but always interested to know fans views, even if they are sometimes biased.

Surely it should be cheaper to buy a ticket ahead? Your basically committing yourself to going which for a sport that can be easily affected by the weather and last minute line up changes is quite a big thing.

Tom Brennan certainly has the pedigree. Anders Rowe is doing amazing, seems only like yesterday he was racing in junior heats around Lakeside, he was not a Lakeside asset but he was there pretty much every week getting experience, that track of course is now gone but its legacy of giving youngsters track time will live on for a while yet. Nathan Ablitt is another I keep an eye on from Lakeside days.

Trouble with having six team league and play offs, you would have to be really desperate to make sure you do not finish in the bottom two places, if it was a 10 team league then getting in the top four is a much bigger ask and a promoter is likely to risk paying out on a big gun to help the team in the hope it would pay off, all things being even you have a 68% chance of getting in the top four anyway. Six clubs, what's the point? you only need to be better than just two teams in the whole league and your in the play offs, putting it like that, its even more farcical.

Always seems like rinse and repeat with Lewis, maybe he believed his own hype too much when he was young and still has trouble accepting he is a decent rider but not much more than that. Always put the effort in but also maybe guilty of over trying and fighting the bike rather than riding it?

Some have mentioned it was inside line or nothing, sounds like Lakeside back in the Ronnie Russel days, water that type of track it does not produce grip, just makes it like an ice rink.

Would Pride bring new fans in? Would it alienate most of the current age range which lets face it is quite old with maybe old fashioned views? Two things to unpack there, speedway isn’t trendy enough but you can’t just go changing everything and risk losing the few fans you have left with no certainly you will get the numbers in to replace them yet along build on. Most clubs seem to be reporting good crowd numbers early on, classic novelty factor, but many will not come back once they are reminded of some of the reasons why they stopped going in the first place, we all know those.

Just one more reason to go back to the old upright style of bikes, back then meetings went ahead more often than not, the laydowns seem only capable of being ridden on a perfect track and the riders now have that notion cemented firmly in their subconscious. But there is some contradictions to what i have read on here, one point saying they could not get water on the track, whilst also reading the riders didnt want to ride because the track was too wet. If it was too dry, that's not an argument, most practice days are held in dust bowl conditions, far worse than you would ever likely see in a real time match.

True Rob, there is some initial cost with making sure you have the equipment. A lot of non league football clubs invested a bit of money so they could film matches and have the ability to connect everything up to a streaming service, so they would have the initial setup costs, providing they do not already have the equipment, then service fees to the streaming company, but overtime that would be paid back, not just over one season but many, this really would be a long term scheme for well beyond any pandemic situation, most non league football clubs seemed to be around a tenner, speedway is sort of on a level with that but £12 is ok, there is a balance, you don't want to price it too low so nobody goes to watch live, but not too high so the take up is so low it becomes unsustainable.

You could even say, even if they charged £5 that's five pounds more than they would have got without streaming because its about people who probably would not have gone even if they could. My nearest track is now Ipswich, I probably wont bother going to one of their meetings in person because of factors like time to get their and back, fuel costs etc but if they charged £10 streaming I might give a couple of meetings a go, that's £20 they got for no extra outlay.

Agree Steve and I don’t think Eurosport can complain unless they were going to show highlights or full coverage of every meeting, and I doubt they will show even 25% of PL meetings raced.

No team should be losing by that many points at home unless they had riders injured and the early part of the meeting and simply ran out of riders. But the Prem is a complete farce this season with only six teams, and retaining the play offs make it even more of a farce.

What I cannot get is that when TV show meetings, they place quite an emphasis on those watching at home and those attending live come second to the production. But how are those tv audiences supposed to get hooked if they only see one meeting every few weeks? they see one match and the league table and then when the next match comes around, all of a sudden all the teams have played several more times and there has been no reference to it.

Shame they cannot cover the 2nd division, they could have a meeting to show every week, things like this would be much better as a weekly show and quite frankly it’s not worth getting Eurosport if tv meetings are going to be sporadic.