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It is time for one league. One of the reasons why I've only been to my club Leicester once this season is down to the lack of variety, it's the same riders every other week. There is zero incentive for me to watch Ipswich one week when I know in a few weeks time we could be facing them in the KO cup or the play offs. People will say there isn't enough riders and that's it, but is that my problem to fix? No it isn't. I don't go to watch speedway for GP stars, I go for the speedway. I love watching Fricke every week at Leicester, but I also loved watched the Thompson twins come through the ranks taking on the senior pros. That was just as exciting for me as watching a GP star. Let's be honest we only have a few GP stars anyways? Were missing Lambert, Bartosz, Laguta, Lingren etc. We only have the riders that are allowed here by there polish clubs lets be honest. They just come here for fun some would say. Let's not forget how expensive they are as well. Costing thousands every week! We can manage one big league, how? Maybe look at what some of championship clubs have done this season, some brand new riders to the league and promoting the youth from the NDL. It would lower the standard but I don't care, let's back the kids and give them plenty of riders and pay them a reasonable wage so riders like Sonny Springer can get back into speedway.

I wasn't p1ssed off leaving foxhole last night #justsaying 🤣

Thank you for your positivity. Do you really think Redcar would not have looked at every available option before booking Jye ? Have you ever been a team manager? Looking for a guest to ride on a Friday night ? In Glasgow ? With 6 teams in action ?

It’s YOU who has the rose tinted glasses on Buttons. Not only was there no contact, it wasn’t even close! I probably had the best view in the house for this incident. Up in the VIP box between first and second bend thanks to Arch. Fact is, Dan passed Kerr up the inside going up the back straight. That then took him wide around bends three and four. Kerr then came steaming down the inside of Dan down the home straight, Dan saw him coming through, panicked and laid it down. I hope this heat gets replayed via rerun so everyone can see. If I’ve got it wrong, I’ll hold my hands up. Pretty sure I haven’t though.

Will be there to cheer the Scorpions on but happy to be included in the attendance figure. Equally happy that the later start time will allow me to double up with one of the local Rugby League Conference games on in the area on the way. Hopefully Comets are now in it for the long term and the fans return in big numbers.

Not even close to ‘first corner bunching’ so there’s no way all four back was an option. Bowtell was out of control hence Loftus running into him. Correct decision.

I'll give you 2... All 4 back or exclude Loftus for running into the back of Bowtell

After opening with a 5-1 the tie should have been over long before the heat 14 incident, it could have gone either way Kerr did put on a right burst of speed but from where I sat there was no contact. (exit of 2nd bend on the grandstand) Ipswich were poor too many errors and last places - track wasn't helping there was some passing but not a lot. One of the only real passes of the night was DanT on Kerr before Kerr then steamed up the inside. I'd like to see a replay of it!! I was really good to see Bomber mixing it - he and Klindt bascially took the Stars through tonight. Good luck to Lynn I think Leicester will win but it must feel good for them to be in the final, its been a lean few years!

If there is one big league it would somehow have to be without the GP riders

Shout out to the Plymouth fans who attended tonight. It was great to see their colours and flags. They also gave their team great backing throughout.

Wooohooo! Pirates win. Phenomenal racing tonight at Scunthorpe. Best racetrack in the league by the country mile. Cooler travelling today so the boys were not knackered. Heat 13 was sublime with Lawson. Heat 14 was amazing with Cook. Commentator said the second half of tonight’s meeting was the best he had ever seen at the track. Can believe it, that was sensational racing.

Isn't that what the GP is for?

Is it too much to hope that Nicholls might be a bit rusty?

Too close to Northampton 😁

Shambles. SIGN REPLACEMENTS.

Big congratulations to the Stars on reaching the KO cup final - and I bet the look on Hawkins face was worth admission fee alone

Not a problem with Atmosphere- that’s not created with Flares and explosions !!

what a scandal in speedway never.

Same here, Don't recall ever leaving a stadium pissed off and angry before, but last night I was fuming. Don't want to hear any excuses, ah so and so had bike problems, a bit of bad luck etc. It's happened one too many times now. This team is not going to win anything this year if they continue to perform like this. Kings Lynn were fired up and fighting for every point, that was clear, we just seemed to be out for a gentle stroll. With the team we have on paper, these performances are just not good enough.

Definitely no contact. it was an excellent ride by Thompson to work his way under Kerr off the second bend - he had tried it the previous lap and obviously thought if he got it right it would work, and it did. Unfortunately, he then made entirely the wrong choice entering the first bend on the final lap - I wonder if the track had got Thompson confused, and he thought he'd be better off trying to put his back wheel on the grippy line, instead of trusting the inside that had served him so well? As it is, Kerr saw a big gap, took advantage, and Thompson had nowhere to go on the outside, which offered nothing at all. The Ref would have had a clear view. When offered such a gap, any rider would have done what Kerr did - if it had been an Witch inside a Star, I'm sure the fans would have been miffed if the Witch had been excluded. Overall, the Witches should never have been in the position of needing three 5-1s in the last three heats at home! KL did just about everything right - and earned a (cough) well-deserved aggregate victory.

Whilst you did indeed congratulate Lynn,the sour grapes to me is from comments like "they wont make the top 4" and " Let them enjoy beating us when it means nothing"

The racing was good but it was only average by Scunny standards, we are truely blessed here.

Just shows if you win you see a great meeting, where last week when you were beat by poor worky you looked for any excuse 🤔

Scunny beaten by the better side, no doubt about it.... Fair play to Poole, some awesome racing, ran out worthy victors. Changes needed for Scunny next year, we can't go on with a team of second strings... it's demoralising.

As sad as it may be, if the stadium is closing/the lease is ending on a certain date, the club may not have any choice in the matter.

A point worth making about heat 14 last night though is that the reason there was no contact is purely down to self preservation from Dan T Should you have to take a hit from an incoming missile in order to benefit from exclusion decision? Certainly being in one piece is far more important than the result.......

Additional links for Toruń v Rybnik: https://vk.com/video-53550004_456242320 https://vk.com/video-220089063_456247139 https://vk.com/video-81427162_456239730 this one for both meetings tonight

twice as good

Scorpions must be fancying there chances with our best rider missing

Like it was when we called off Scunny meeting. The forecast on the Friday was awful but come Saturday sun shone all day with rain appearing at 8-15pm

As Plymouth is already in the general vicinity being at Edinburgh today. I guess it gives the Berwick promotion the option to see if the forecast changes. But I’d be very surprised if the meeting happens.

Damian Ratajczak has left Leszno and signed with Zielona Gora for 3 years.( riding on loan there in 2025).

No apology required - I wasn't there either!

best way to kill the atmosphere, good luck to them, be better if was like over here just old people scattered around the stadiums.

I still can't get over how differently the track behaved compared to last week - there simply wasn't the outside line that King used to such excellent effect. Several riders got caught out (including Doyle who looked uncomfortable on the outside of Bend 2 on more than one occasion) - and KL soon sussed that if you made your opponent go wide, you had the advantage. Also, which I found interesting, was the complete lack of atmosphere. The attendance was no different to last week's match against Belle Vue. Maybe a dozen KL fans? Certainly no noisy group of them during the match - just a few cheers when the team paraded to very empty terraces. Overall though: an splendid effort by the Stars, and a comparatively poor one by the Witches.

Brief shower or two in the morning some light rain in the afternoon and speedway at night

Killeen rode well, wouldn't have taken him out but I was a touch surprised Palovaara got a 4th ride which should have gone to Killeen (Mitch was already in ht 14). An astute tactician would have put Mitch in ht 12 for Killeen as well. As it turns out I doubt it would have made any difference. The other questionable decision was ceding gate choice to the Aces for ht 15 [gate 4 scored just 9 pts all night]

you sound like you are in the school playground ! hopefully promoters will be more mature about it all than you

Well done the Stars on that result. Congratulations. the Witches have more pressing issues all firing for September. I can’t see past them for the aggregate win over any team in the top 4. Some of them had a proper wobble tonight. save it till September.

Are there really enough tracks in Britain to turn anyone down?

I'm going up for this one too, but hopefully the weather won't be a spoiler.

my good god

I would have thought the opposite. Poole needing thier top riders to carry the scoring? Scunthorpe riding at home being the one match where you'd expect very little from away reserves?

What about Northampton ? 🤣 Struggling to find enough support for the ever decreasing number of clubs today. You ould have thought that with the closure of Coventry , Cradley Heath and Wolverhampton that htere woudl be bumper crowds at the one remaining midlands track? Oh no speedway supporters area fickle lot ( and I include myself in that group) Never really could transfer my support bewteen clubs in he London area. As I posted on another thread, the only solution is to close the whole lot down , wind up BSPL Ltd and start again.

No it will be France.

I'm normally on the same page as you Mike but think a championship standard league set up of say 12-14 five man teams is the way to go, I love seeing the top boys on tracks where they can truly display their skills but we can't afford them. I have said before when Rob Lambert turns up for one of his brief stints he's a brilliant rider to watch, but is probably on 4-6k per meeting and I reckon he won't add 50-100 on the gate the numbers just don't stack up. Look at Poole the other week 3k turning up to watch premier league second strings and two point men its about getting a team out that's there for the fans for 90% of meetings. The Ford's are shrewd they know moving up is financial suicide and they are a well run club look what's happended to Brum they signed Lindgren last season even with Wolves closed and the crowd numbers were still utterly terrible.

Here's what I found out thanks to chatGPT: In the modern world technology has become central to our life and computers are now ubiquitous. Are we approaching the point where a machine can pass the ‘Turing test’? [Alan Turing’s formulation of a challenge that a machine could be designed to exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from a human.] The latest development in artificial intelligence – ChatGPT – is edging us closer to the time when AI output becomes indistinguishable from human responses. ChatGPT runs on a language model created by an AI research company to mimic ordinary conversation, called the Generative Pre-trained Transformer based on literally billions of pieces of information from books and the web. Could ChatGPT put columnists (like me) out of business, writing their articles for them? Let’s find out. Spoiler alert: it looks like my job is safe. I started by asking it a couple of open ended discursive questions, and it performed quite well. First it suggested the USA and Australia as target markets for future speedway GP’s and then it gave a remarkably coherent analysis of British speedway’s current problems (riders wages, ageing fan base, under investment in stadiums). I then asked ChatGPT to tell me who is the oldest rider currently active in British speedway. It replied with Scott Nicholls, born 20 June 1978, informing me correctly that he has ridden for several teams including Ipswich, Coventry and Belle Vue. That answer was correct at the time of asking (apart from the birth date which should be 16 May 1978), although Nicki Pedersen’s return to Peterborough now makes him the oldest. My next question: ‘Which speedway teams did Todd Wiltshire ride for?’ should have elicited the answer - Oxford, Reading and Wimbledon. ChatGPT failed miserably, listing ten teams including none of the correct answers! Having failed so badly at what should be a straight-forward ‘look-up the answer’ question, I tried, with some trepidation to ask it a more challenging question. ‘Are there any speedway riders who have ridden for Oxford, Reading and Swindon?’ ‘Yes, there is one … his name is Phil Morris .. rode for Reading Racers from 1987 to 1990, Swindon Robins from 1991 to 1995 and Oxford Cheetahs from 1996 to 2000.’ So a correct answer, apart from the fact that Phil was twelve in 1987 and never rode for Oxford or Swindon! Oh, and the omission of the half a dozen or so correct answers (John Davis, Malcolm Holloway, Travis McGowan, Charlie Gjedde, Glenn Cunningham, Andy Smith, Joonas Davidsson) But I couldn’t resist one last question: ‘Why were Reading Bulldogs robbed of the 2006 British speedway Elite League Championship?’ ‘The Reading Bulldogs were not robbed … in fact they won the title that year, beating Coventry Bees in the final. … according to official records and news sources, the Reading Bulldogs were the legitimate champions of the 2006 Elite League.” Well, I’m taking that as proof Reading were 2006 champions, after all it was on the internet – it must be true, mustn’t it? Article first appeared in Oxford programme 12.04.23

Good Luck to Scott Nicholls at Plymouth. I only read last week that he has his first spin at Poole after Oxford was called off and he doubted he could be fitted in anywhere at this late stage due to his average. Wish him well and the Coliseum will certainly test his "wing" out. Hope fully stays fit for remainder of the season and then can have a potential Farewell Tour next season {should he choose to do so}

Maybe if the Workington fans are not happy with this thread they could dissolve it and start a new one and blame everyone but themselves and their promotion for the direction it's gone in and how its ended up.💣 just putting on my body armour and tin hat😁