NEW LODZ STADIUM

[BarracudaAce]

As I mentioned briefly in the Wroclaw v Torun, Sunday August 19th. topic, I made a visit to Lodz to see their new speedway stadium whilst I was staying in Wroclaw last month.

The match I attended was Lodz v Pila on Friday 17^th August.

The new stadium is indeed very impressive, and I thoroughly enjoyed my visit. Everything, however, isn’t up and running yet. There was no ticket office or club shop in operation, with ticket sales from a van on the roadside and merchandising from a couple of tables outside the stadium. Admission tickets were 25 zloty (£5.26) and programmes (£1.05). The electronic turnstiles were not in use and entrance was through the exit gates with someone checking and clipping tickets. Not all the toilet blocks were open with those in use being ‘unisex’. The floodlights were not yet commissioned, so hence the unusually early weekday start time of 5:15p.m. The area between the old and new stadiums is still very much like a building site and, for those that know the Belle Vue area; the old and new Lodz stadiums are much much closer than the NSS is to the Greyhound Stadium.

Before the match I had an interesting 15 minutes or so talk with Hans Andersen. He wasn’t selected to ride in the Lodz team that day, but was about to do some ‘meet and greet’ with the fans at the merchandise stand. He mentioned that he very much liked racing at the NSS, but hadn’t been able to put four or five consistent rides together. ‘I can win some, but also run lasts’ he said – as if to predict exactly what he would go on to do three days later when he had two wins and a last amongst his rides in the Aces v Leicester match!!

Thankfully, the refreshments stands were all open – it was a very hot and sunny day and touching 30 Celsius – and, as I was in the queue, one of the Lodz supporters struck up a conversation with me when he heard me speak and spotted my Aces cap. He was most likely in his late 40s and spoke English more than good enough to hold a conversation, insisting on buying me a beer. Later at the end, he and his friends came over to me outside. They must have spotted me buying a Lodz cap at the merchandise stand, as he presented me with a Lodz scarf and said ‘to go with your new cap’. Before waving goodbye he said they don’t often get foreign visitors – ‘they all want to go to Torun or Gorzow’ he said ‘so we are happy you’ve come to see us’. Speedway fans eh? Fantastic people.

As for the match itself, there was some good racing with Lodz beating Pila 53-37. It had been pretty close through the first half of the match, and after heat 6 it was only 19-17. Pila, though, only managed one heat advantage after that, but when they had either Thomas H. Jonasson or Tomasz Gapinski out on track there was some good battles with the Lodz heat leaders. For Lodz, Aces’ Rohan Tungate scored 6+2 from 3 completed rides - he had a tapes exclusion in his other heat - and Poole’s Josh Grajczonek 4+1 from 4 outings. For Pila, Thomas H. Jonasson was in fine form scoring 15+1 from 6 rides whilst Tomasz Gapinski got 11 from 5. The track length in the new stadium is 321 metres and, at the time, Rohan Tungate held the track record at 58.84. I’m not sure, though, if it’s now been bettered as they’ve had a few meetings since as they catch up with their home matches.  There was just one sub-60 second winning time in the Pila match, however, and that was 59.94 by Lodz reserve Jakub Miskowiak in the reserves race. He went onto score 11 from 5 rides.

It was quite a long day as the coach had left Wroclaw at 10:15a.m. on Friday, getting back at 12:30a.m. going into Saturday morning. It was well worth it, though, and it would be nice to return one day to Lodz to see the fully finished stadium and surrounds.

[JCookie]

Great post, really enjoyed it. Pleased to hear you had a good day, would love to start visiting some lower league stuff in foreign countries, interesting stuff.

[2ndBender]

Thoroughly enjoyed your post BB and I'm glad you had a good time! I've met some generous people on visits to Poland myself, notably at Katowice and Gniezno - you are dead right about 'Speedway people'. You mentioned a 'set' track record at the meeting you attended, so I'm assuming that meeting wasn't the first at the new stadium? I'm not up to speed with Lodz's fixtures, but as a programme collector I'd be keen to get a copy of their first one. One interesting question though - do you think the attendances at Lodz are going to justify the capital investment involved in building a brand new stadium? I read that at one of their meetings the attendance was only around 300.

[Mark]

17 minutes ago, 2ndBender said:

Thoroughly enjoyed your post BB and I'm glad you had a good time! I've met some generous people on visits to Poland myself, notably at Katowice and Gniezno - you are dead right about 'Speedway people'. You mentioned a 'set' track record at the meeting you attended, so I'm assuming that meeting wasn't the first at the new stadium? I'm not up to speed with Lodz's fixtures, but as a programme collector I'd be keen to get a copy of their first one. One interesting question though - do you think the attendances at Lodz are going to justify the capital investment involved in building a brand new stadium? I read that at one of their meetings the attendance was only around 300.

the stands were not open for the day of 300.    BB found it not fully built when he went.    Next season will be the judge but maybe they will hold a Euro round too.

Edited September 3, 2018 by Mark

[BarracudaAce]

The match I attended v Pila was the 4^th of their 7 home matches they rode between 30^th July and 30^th August, having already completed their 7 away matches.

These home matches included some on weekdays when they had start times between 4.45pm and 5.30pm due to the floodlights not having been brought into use. This would obviously have an effect on their attendances. The fact, too, that they unable to make the playoffs after losing at home to Rybnik in their 3^rd home match might have put off some folks trying to rush there straight from work?

The Rybnik match was held on a Saturday when the attendance was just over 5,000 (the capacity I understand is 10,400) and they opened some of the stands around 1^st/2^nd (the ‘home’ end) and 3^rd/4^th turns and along the home straight. The all-seater stadium, incidentally, I’d best describe as a ‘single tiered mini-Torun’ with all the stands covered and the pits situated along the back straight.

On the day I was there it was just the 1^st/2^nd turns and the home straight open, and I had a fantastic view from the back row at the exit of the second bend. I was told afterwards that the attendance was 3,612 by one of the officials at the merchandise stall, and I did see that the Speedway Star reported it as 3,500. (They do seem to ‘round up / down’ the Polish attendances in the Star, they showed the Wroclaw v Torun attendance from two nights later as 11,000 when the published attendance was shown as 10,847.)

With regards to that small attendance 2ndBender saw, it might well have been the opening match. They had a very last minute problem, after selling tickets, in obtaining the final ‘health & safety’ clearance certificate and this severely affected the number of fans allowed into the stadium.

As Mark says, next season will give them a much better indication on the attendances. If they have all their home matches at weekends – and are challenging for the play-offs – you’d like to think they will have more seats occupied than empty.

For 2ndBender, here’s an email address I used to make enquiries before my visit (I received a very useful and informative reply) that you could use if you’d like to contact them about obtaining a programme from the opening match.

klub@orzel.lodz.pl

It possibly might be that they issued just one magazine style programme to cover all 7 meetings, and then had different scorecharts included for the respective matches. The programme I bought had team and other photos and narrative for the last 10 seasons or so and had scorecharts inside for both the Pila match and the Krakow match two days later.  

Finally, here's a couple of photo I found on the Lodz website. The one on the left shows the very vociferous fans on the 1st / 2nd turns during the parade. The second shows me on the back row (red & black Aces cap) busy filling in the programme. The guy stood up in the yellow/red/green shirt was busy leading the Pila fans in their cheering and chants. There was no segregation in place and there was a good few Pila fans sitting below and left of him off-photo.

[2ndBender]

Thanks for the link BB, and also for another very informative and interesting post!

[BarracudaAce]

On 9/3/2018 at 10:59 AM, JCookie said:

Great post, really enjoyed it. Pleased to hear you had a good day, would love to start visiting some lower league stuff in foreign countries, interesting stuff.

If you get the opportunity you must!!

Although I've visited Poznan and Gdansk for other meetings, I have also attended both venues for Polish Second Division matches.

It was at the huge track in Poznan - 10 years ago now - that I saw a 'derby' match between Poznan and Bydgoszcz that went to a last heat decider. Adam Skornicki and Andreas Jonsson were, without checking to make sure, the respective team captains and the visitors won 46-44. Leaving the match, we had really been impressed with one of the Bydgoszcz reserves. Despite being the Under-21 World Champion he was then still relatively little known in the UK, but in this match had really been the difference between the two sides . He would later go onto become a Grand Prix rider (and now a Speedway of Nations World Champion).....none other than Emil Sayfutdinov!!

[iris123]

8,000 at Łódź today for an international 4 team meeting won by Australia

Edited September 16, 2018 by iris123