Conkers in Gravy

Wolves and Cradley. Probably the closest and arguably the fiercest. Unless you count Poole and everyone else.

A startling result considering the competition. Well-deserved recognition for one of the greatest racers we've ever seen.

There's a pop-up box on the site from moneyweek saying it's the end of Britain completely - I'm just off to the shop to stock up on tins.

I accept that there are considerably more problems putting on 20+ home meetings than 12 Saturday night one-offs in (mostly) smart stadia, but the point I was trying to make is that the GP series - has made domestic speedway look very much a plain Jane. Lonigo, for example, may be a bit low key, but most rounds have an atmosphere and a buzz about them that makes me sit up and take notice. Attendances at single GP rounds may not match the old World Finals, but when you have 12 mostly well-attended rounds the maths is hard to argue with. I haven't been to speedway more than a handful of times in the last few years (that's a question of geography, not choice), but from watching on TV the GPs have the feel of a modern, 21st century sport (my opinion!) while league matches always have the feel of something I used to do when Siouxsie and the Banshees were in the charts.

I had a totally illogical dislike for Karl Fiala. Never met him so I've no idea why and if Karl sees this - sorry. Totally agree with SCB regarding Pedersen - I want to dislike him, but I love to watch him ride. The sport would be so much duller without him.

Maybe it hasn't had that effect, but I don't blame BSI for that. British speedway's problems are more at their own door. Several of my non-speedway supporting friends watched the last two or three GPs last season on TV because Tai Woffinden was close to winning the title. I very much doubt they'd bother to go down to a local track for 15 minutes and that's yer lot on a mediocre track with poor facilities. Take the GPs out of the sport and the best meeting you've got is last season's ELRC or the British Final and the sport disappears further into obscurity.

World Finals in Britain would probably have attracted bigger crowds if they had been held at Cardiff (putting aside the fact the Millennium Stadium wasn't opened until 1999), but it took BSI and the grand prix series to take the world championship up a level in terms of professionalism and presentation. It was BSI who had the imagination to take the GP series to Cardiff and as a result British speedway enjoys a big day out with 40,000ish fans ,every year - not once every five or six years. It would be nice if BSI were to invest in British speedway, but I don't see how that could happen. Would they invest in Poland, Sweden and Denmark too? If they did, then £3m (if that is the figure) doesn't go very far. For my money, BSI have done a good job in raising standards in the world championship. I loved the old world finals, but by the end they were pretty poor (Pocking in 93 was a shambles). BSI have provided speedway with a quality flagship which ought to raise interest in the sport. It's British speedway's problem if it can't keep up.

I'd agree with that unless the Poles can be persuaded to switch a match to midweek. BT is packed with football and rugby at weekends (and close season is only a few weeks now) with live games on both channels, while their midweek schedule is pretty thin.

Speedway was tried on and off in Dublin at several venues, mostly in the 1950s, and at a couple of places in Northern Ireland. You can still see the track at Ballymena United's football ground, but it's been tarmacked for stock cars now. Harold's Cross Stadium, where racing was staged in 1928, would be a great venue now. There's an Irish speedway thread somewhere on here. As to why it's never taken off, maybe it's too small a population with already a lot of popular sports. Back to the subject. Good news on the Sky deal. Looking forward to the action starting in March.

I think the fact that Tai was born in Scunthorpe, lives in Britain, has a British family and rides under a British licence should give you a clue as to his nationality.

I have to disagree. I accept that logic would suggest that televised sport would discourage potential fans from attending in 'real life', but the evidence of virtually every other sport is overwhelmingly the opposite. Speedway has so far failed to capitalise on national exposure to hundreds of thousands, even millions, of Sky subscribers and viewers and this new deal - assuming it materialises - seems to be the last chance.

Of course speedway has declined since the introduction of live TV - I think it's pretty clear from the post that I realise the decline had already started and that I don't blame TV.

Speedway has declined since Sky started live coverage, we can all agree on that. But how many other sports have had live TV coverage and got worse? Rugby League was close to death's door before Sky came along and although some clubs have their troubles, the professional game is played to a high standard, in mostly comfortable, clean stadia with two or three games a week well-presented on TV. I used the example of Brentford v Gillingham earlier and that's true of all football. There's more football on TV than it's possible to watch (15 games in three days on Sky and BT starting next Friday night), yet grounds are packed with fans prepared to pay anything between £20 and £60 for a ticket. People see football and rugby on TV and want to be part of it. It's easy to blame TV for speedway's problems, but I think it's putting two and two together and making five. Remove live speedway from TV and you've killed off the last chance for national exposure of the sport and I think it would decline down to grasstrack levels. Other sports use TV to generate interest and then deliver in terms of excitement and value when folk go to games. Speedway obviously doesn't do that despite having a privileged position with Sky that other comparable sports like basketball and ice hockey haven't. You need to look at the sport for the answer, not blame an organisation which has given speedway a platform to promote itself and handed over quite a bit of cash in the process.

Good question. Sky started televising Rugby League on a Monday night and in the football season, they had their Monday Night Football - probably the best sports show on TV. Also, the chaotic nature of last season's EL programme won't have helped. I'm only guessing here.

Pinegen did launch a monthly magazine to go alongside the Star in the 1990s (98?) to provide more in-depth features - I wrote a couple of pieces for it - but it didn't last long. Speedway Star, on the other hand, has been with us for decades and has seen off all the opposition which tells us that, while some on BSF don't like it, many (or at least enough) speedway fans do like it.

I know it's a pain when meetings are moved around for TV, but every other sport has the same issue - even :Premier League football - so I reckon we'll have to put up with Monday nights.

I'm not saying it wouldn't be good to see some more in-depth examination of the sport, but speedway is so small-time now that there's not many of us who would want to read it. Most of the reports in Speedway Star are written by freelancers or reporters with other publications who are earning a bit of cash on the side (I used to be one of them). For the money the Star was able to offer, I could never justify the time to do anything more than a match report and a round-up of the local track's news. And journalists can be more expensive than you'd imagine! It's easy to say it's just a couple of hours on the internet, but if you're talking about the kind of length and depth of feature the Star might want, you need to arrange and conduct interviews, check facts (some journalists do!) and then write the several thousand words. An experienced freelancer costs somewhere between £15 and £25 per hour - a lot of money for a small publication facing an already hefty freelance bill. I'm with you in wishing for more from the Star, but I can understand why they maybe have to take what seems like the line of least resistance.

The problem with investigative journalism is that it's expensive for the what you get in the end. Employing a suitably able or qualified journalist to dig out maybe one story a month is beyond the budget of small publications like the Star (they spend enough just to get reports and news from all the country's tracks) and few, if any, freelancers are prepared to take on that kind of work for limited return. It's a problem faced by all kinds of newspaper and magazines. It doesn't matter whether there's a web of lies and corruption at the heart of the sport or not - and I suspect there isn't - it's just not worth anyone's time or money to unearth it. I happen to think Speedway Star does a pretty good job considering it's audience is limited to a tiny number of competitors and a few thousand regular spectators. Few other minority sports have a weekly magazine of similar quality.

Regardless of the payment (or lack of it) from the broadcaster, what kind of amateurish, incompetent organisation would give up the chance of a two-hour weekly advert for their product (repeated a couple of times the following day)? Probably best not to answer that. Also, imagine you're in a meeting with a speedway promoter/rider asking your firm for sponsorship, what's your first question? You're going to be far more likely to hand over some cash if your potential audience is counted in tens of thousands, rather than a few hundred. I know it's dangerous to compare football with speedway, but my point was that live TV was a catalyst for the revival of interest in the game, helping to make an unfashionable way of spending a Saturday afternoon into something people are prepared to spend a significant amount of their income to be a part of. Rugby Union, Rugby League and cricket have had similar transformations (I know there are some financial problems in certain RL clubs, but I'm making comparisons with the 80s). Cricket has responded to the TV age and transformed itself with the introduction of T20 and a sharper version of the 40/50 over game. The result is crowds and income at the gate has increased. When did a county cricket club last go out of business? As far as live TV putting people off going to matches, Brentford v Gillingham was on Sky last night and the crowd was 7,713 - 700 more than the average gate at Griffin Park. Live TV is a valuable asset whether you get a fee or not. It's up to the promoters now. We need more of the Berwick v Newcastle and less of the Belle Vue v Poole.

The "live TV keeps fans away" argument was used by football authorities all through the 70s and early 80s when crowds were diminishing rapidly, stadiums were disgraceful tips, pitches were mudheaps and the product on the field was generally poor (sound familiar?) . The turnaround in football's fortunes started when Greg Dyke and ITV finally persuaded the FA and the Football League to allow live televised games. This brought live football into homes throughout the country, created new interest that peaked with the 1990 World Cup and the game hasn't looked back since. I'm not suggesting speedway has any chance of that kind of success, but in the 21st century live TV is a fantastic way of getting speedway's message out there, potentially reaching thousands of people who might be tempted to visit a local track. It's the kind of coverage modern sports fans expect.and it's up to the promoters to do something they mostly haven't so far and promote the TV meetings hard, get a decent crowd in, prepare a decent track and the result should be a decent meeting that makes a night at the speedway look something worth considering. It is also an attractive enducement for riders to put in front of potential sponsors. I've just flicked through the sports channels and the only sports I can find that have only a highlights show (as opposed to condensed versions of events that have already been shown live) are carp angling and something call ice cross (?). That tells us TV channels aren't much interested in highlights shows and the reason for that will be that viewers and advertisers aren't much interested in highlights shows.

Not sure about this but - L Lindgren and Thorsell.

It's true that doubling up is nothing new. Wolves bumped along through 1976 and 77 with five riders, a bit of paper saying they had a sixth rider and Ellesmere Port's John Jackson or Boston's Rob Hollingworth (something like that anyway) and they were far from being alone in the old British League. If there had been a BSF in those days you can bet we'd have been heaping ridicule on that situation. The point is that doubling up is all too often doubling down (Jason Doyle the prime example) and has contributed to the shortage of decent British riders. I wouldn't be surprised to find that the introduction of NL/young British reserves in the Elite League was an attempt to push the PL to one side in the development of riders in this country. The MDL-NL-PL-EL route that many on here favour is just too cumbersome and takes far too long.

In the 60s, entire teams from England and Scotland set up camp in the USA to compete in a league there, hence the LA Wolves were US champions in 1968 (I think that's the right date). Riders competing for multiple teams is not ideal, but a necessary evil if (and that's a big IF) they are to earn living as a full-time rider. Unfortunately, doubling up/down has developed into a vicious circle which means that riders who can only make speedway pay by racing three or four times a week are blocking the progress of young, homegrown riders. Foreign Elite League second strings (and sometimes heat leaders) are being brought in to PL teams by promoters whose need for guaranteed points outweighs any responsibility he may have to encourage young riders. Maybe it's time we accepted the sport as it is in the UK can support only a handful of full-time speedway riders.

That's the point I was making. We'll see fewer sub-standard foreigners and many more British riders on Elite League tracks next year and - as long as the heat formula is sympathetic - that can only be a good thing for the future. Some PL-standard Brits may suffer a setback in the short-term, but if the likes of Auty, Lawson and Birks are good enough, they will come again.

Maybe a weeding out of second-rate foreign riders is long overdue - our league system has done far more for Australian speedway over the last few years than it has for British speedway. It is tough on riders like Auty, Howarth, Birks and Lawson (among others), but they have had a lot of chances in the top league and come up short.