arthur cross

Given even basic PR standards at the messaging club, I'd say your etiquette is absolutely correct. Given the near total absence of any PR standards at this particular messaging club, I don't blame Edinburgh (or Cradley, or the "live on Sky" section of that tv-network's website) on this occasion for covering their respective angles of the fallout from Saturday's fiasco without waiting for the go-ahead. The continuing deafening silence from Belle Vue this morning simply reinforces Edinburgh/Cradley/Sky's attitude.

News obviously travels slowly to Edinburgh if it only got there yesterday afternoon from Monday's meet-the-riders night at Cradley where West Midlands fans were told both Good Friday and Easter Monday (BV Colts v Cradley) were already off, prompting all sorts of scurrying from the Belle Vue end to find out how they knew One golden rule of PR is that if you set yourself a time a couple of days ahead to update a sticky situation, for goodness sake have something, anything, the smallest shred of new information to keep any recovery ticking along at the appointed time. Mind you, if your PR's so hopeless despite having the ear of folk like Philip Rising, I guess this morning's deafening silence becomes normal.

Very well noted ... yet, incredibly, repeated attempts by one enlightened promoter to at least debate adapting the North American major leagues' model of conferences/divisions into British speedway has been ignorantly discarded every time in a hurry, sometimes with ridiculously abusive responses. Too many glory-hunting promoters lose sight of the fact that most 65-25 runaway wins in speedway are far less entertaining than a 7-0 win in football or a 60-0 demolition in rugby because at least the goals/tries have to be scored by skilfully working your way through or past the opposition for every score instead of simply leaving them behind at the first bend of most speedway heats in a similar thrashing. By the way, Eastbourne's volunteering to step down to the 2015 National League is the 2nd-best shrewdly realistic decision I've seen in our domestic speedway in recent years, beaten only by Ipswich's volunteering to step down to the 2011 Premier League within days of tasting that level in their 2010 Elite-relegation meetings against Newcastle.

In that case, particularly if you have a closer vantage point, who is ? !!

So it's taken 11 years and nearly 5 months since Colin Hill's death (30-Oct-2004) to reach today's extraordinarily-timed exit by the club who galloped so recklessly through the final chunk of his legacy for speedway, ideally in-or-around Exeter but later widened across the rest of Devon. My first dealings with any speedway promoter were with Colin Hill in 1988-&-89 when I was studying in Exeter so although I now live well away from the South-West, it saddens me greatly to see such an abrupt end for the Devils. I've plenty of sympathy for Plymouth's riders and fans ... another name I'd add to that list (although I've often been critical of his overall BSPA chairmanship in recent years) is Alex Harkess given his immense determination in previous winters to keep the Devils included within the Premier League. What a kick in the teeth for such outside effort in the recent past for the local guardians of the club to bale out at such an early stage of this season ... at the very least, the Devils riders, fans and the speedway world in general deserve a much better explanation than today's brief news from David Short (or anyone else near the top of that club) to explain why it's taken just one individual meeting to drive such a wretched skewer into their 2016 budget. From my distance, it looks like Mr Short should never again be allowed anywhere near the running of a speedway club given the budget gap that's suddenly yawned open here.

I thought greyhound racing's attitude to Galliard Homes' grip on the Greyhound Racing Association (and, therefore, the great likelihood of as many dwellings as possible being built on the stadium site) was hopelessly naive. But at least that sport's been campaigning about the situation for a few years even if it's often looked like doomed campaigning. So how come the stock car lobby are only just cottoning on to the gravity of the whole saga and urgently chasing 10,000 signatures to their petition ? !! ... where was any noise from this lobby when, last February, the greyhound industry (plenty of representatives of the Irish breeding/training angles included) descended on London's City Hall for a widely-praised "Show of Passion" to keep their activity going at Wimbledon Stadium ? !! That's a hell of an achievement by the GRA landlords if they've managed to keep the stock car mob so unaware of the overall situation for so long.

Thanks for your kind words Salty. Yes, it used to be chaotic at the Durnsford Road traffic lights but in those days no-one had yet invented the concept of event-day parking zones as an occasional alternative to permanently-enforced parking zones so I'm sure there'll be at least a quarter-mile ban on matchday parking unless you're a local resident and that will cause more widespread but stodgy traffic instead of a smaller gridlock. Once it became clear the Greyhound Racing Association were in the grip of Galliard Homes, the rest of the greyhound industry has been dreadfully naive in hoping its passionate campaigning to keep the dog track open would work. Instead, at a much earlier stage, that industry should have regarded any remaining time at Wimbledon as a bonus and channelled much more of its energy into identifying a site upon which it could build a 21st century home for that sport relatively near to London ... not easy, I accept, given land prices in that area but there are a few brown-field sites that are never likely to be deemed suitable for housing, notably the large sweep of marshland on the border of the Sutton and Croydon boroughs that I've mentioned in this thread before which was historically the sewage zone for the whole of South London (hence its unsuitability for permanent living across its entire space for health reasons but still realistic to purify a chunk of it for commercial use or leisure facilities). At least in this respect, the original Wimbledon FC did the right thing by facing up quickly and realistically around 1990 about how impossible it would be for them to keep staging top-flight football at their end of Plough Lane although I doubt anyone involved at the time would have predicted the Milton Keynes, Surrey non-league and Kingstonian elements of what's followed.

Local politicians in London with a long memory won't have forgotten what happened in the 1990 Greenwich borough elections when enough Charlton Athletic fans stood for the Voice Of The Valley party to field a full set of candidates in protest that the council wasn't helping that football club anywhere near as much as it should have been to restore their famous old ground, thus forcing at least a 6th season of renting Crystal Palace's Selhurst Park for home games (in the end, after that 6th Charlton season borrowing Selhurst, Wimbledon became the new Selhurst tenants so Charlton switched to West Ham's Upon Park for a season and the next autumn before The Valley reopened in December 1992). . Incredibly, VOTV collected nearly 15,000 votes and it remains one of the very few examples of a party not remotely interested in day-to-day politics having a big impact on an election because although none of the VOTV candidates won a council seat, their presence on the ballot paper and the hefty number of votes they drained from established councillors clearly had the decisive swing in ousting at least 2 big local names. Add that Charlton/Greenwich example to any political shame in Merton for the 1980's treatment of Wimbledon FC plus the increasing desperation of nearly any council to boost its council tax revenues regardless of the consequences and any common sense arguments about the ever-increasing risks of flooding don't stand a chance. Car boot sales don't generate council tax revenue while clogging up the traffic ... apartments do generate council tax revenue while clogging up the traffic ... spot the subtle difference ? !! And remember, floods only happen "once in a lifetime" long after the councillors who've increased the risk of them are no longer serving insde the council chamber ... try explaining that to the folk in Carlisle who've just had their 3rd "flood of a lifetime" during the 21st century (2005, 2009 and last week) !!

Difficult to sum up the turbulent history of the original Wimbledon FC (and particularly its home ground at the west end of Plough Lane) in just a few paragraphs for a forum like this, but here goes ... the key thing about viability is that top-division football at that original ground became ever more impossible whereas at least lower-division football on the bigger site of the current Wimbledon Stadium would be much more realistic. (If you google-map that area, the old football ground took up just the land hemmed inside the junction of Durnsford Road and Plough Lane to the west of the River Wandle where the 4 apartment blocks parallel to each other now stand) Just when the club was beginning its rapid rise through the divisions (4th-Div winners 1983, 3rd Div runners-up '84 and 2nd Div promotion '86), a previous and much less football-friendly edition of Merton Council reckoned it could still buy back that ground for its late-1950's rateable value of only £8,200 thanks to an agreement struck in that earlier time when it had helped to stabilise the club's finances. That harsh attitude from the 1980's council meant Wimbledon FC were already trying to find a new home even before the all-seater requirements of football's Taylor Report would have left Plough Lane with only about 6,000 as its all-seater capacity (it was roughly double that while terracing remained allowed) ... it also meant there were plenty of supporters and club officials who would have preferred nothing to do with any civic parade celebrating the 1988 FA Cup triumph given they felt the council didn't deserve any glow from the football club's glory. A nearby site sketched out as the Wandle Valley Stadium seating 20,000 would have doubled up as Wimbledon's new football ground plus an upgrade for the 15,000-capacity Crystal Palace arena a few miles away that was long established as London's premier athletics venue ... it would have been the same size as the recently defunct Don Valley Stadium in Sheffield that was built at much the same time for that city's hosting of the 1991 World Student Games. But Wandle Valley never got going, partly because its multi-sport and community aspects that were vital to its overall viability required its football-field to be an artificial surface at just the time the Football League was banning such pitches after so many sides hated QPR's plastic surface at Loftus Road. Hence why Wimbledon became the 2nd football club (immediately after Charlton's ground-sharing spell at Crystal Palace) to rent Selhurst Park for home games, starting in August 1991 because terracing was only allowed to remain in use by then in the top 2 divisions providing you could prove how your existing ground would become all-seater or you clearly had a new all-seater home on the horizon. (That's why Sunderland were still allowed to use terracing at Roker Park as late as the 1996-97 Premiership season, albeit limited in capacity to only the number of seats that particular terracing could house, because they repeatedly showed successfully that they were on their way, firstly to a site next to Nissan's factory that was never used because it was trumped by the fresh availability of the former Wearmouth Colliery that did become the Stadium of Light ) As long as Wimbledon stayed in the top-flight, it was financially viable for them to rent Selhurst Park simply thanks to the combination of tv-money and huge numbers of away fans regularly outnumbering the Dons fans. All sorts of projects to give Wimbledon FC a new home were mooted but whether they were local or wildly distant (some of you might remember moving them to Dublin to create every away fan's jolly-trip of the season got stacks of media coverage), nothing emerged and their relegation from the Premier League in May 2000 after 14 top-level seasons wrecked the financial balancing act. It wasn't long before rock-promoter Pete Winkleman's plan to relocate them to Milton Keynes became easily the most practical but also hugely controversial way to prop up that version of Wimbledon FC at roughly the level it was holding within the league pyramid (as it's turned out, it's only this season after several near-misses that MK Dons are finally playing in what's now the Championship on their own merit) ... once that move was given the football authorities' blessing, that's when the current AFC Wimbledon was formed in 2002 by the supporters appalled at the 60-mile move north, initially taking a couple of thousand away fans to tiny non-league grounds in Surrey that often didn't have even 100 home fans !! Looking forward, Dagenham & Redbridge would be as good an example as any other London club of how a lower-league side can be viable in the capital despite the mega-millions of the bigger clubs ... that club's roots belong to 4 different historically famous non-league East London sides because Leytonstone merged with Ilford and then further merged with Walthamstow Avenue to create Redbridge Forest before yet another merger with Dagenham created the current club which remains on Dagenham's traditional ground but whose upgrading to top non-league and then Football League standard was reliant on Redbridge's financial clout. AFC Wimbledon have shown in recent seasons they have the equivalent of Redbridge's financial clout but they haven't had the equivalent of Dagenham's traditional ground within Wimbledon's geographical area ... meanwhile, it's clear there's a current mood within many of Merton's councillors that returning the modern local successors to Wimbledon FC into the borough will be a political apology for the council's 1980's attitude. And then, of course, there's the financial side in council tax revenue that a rectangular sporting floorspace surrounded by rectangular stands is far easier for developers to build a greater number of apartments into the remaining space compared to the oval-shaped (and bigger) sporting floorspace that any combination of greyhounds, speedway or stock cars require ... as I've pointed out on this thread before, even as big a rectangular sporting floorspace as Cardiff's Millennium Stadium houses only a 285-metre speedway track for its Grand Prix whereas any greyhound development at Wimbledon would have wanted to stay close to the current 414-metre dog track. All of which helps explain why Merton Council's so overwhelmingly voted for the football plan despite Wandsworth Council's continuing (and very justifiable) concern that any flood management written into this football plan could shift the risk of the River Wandle bursting its banks further downstream into the remaining mile of that river that's entirely within Wandsworth's boundaries before it flows into the Thames close to Wandsworth town centre.

Hold on a minute, you ignorant buffoon. Anyone with even a modest knowledge of the Wimbledon Stadium site knows that its north-east chunk is actually inside the London Borough of Wandsworth !! ... the border between Merton and Wandsworth runs through the stadium's land !! Clearly the bulk of the stadium site is within Merton, hence why any planning matters so far have gone through their council operations. But one of the few things everyone can agree upon, be they football, greyhound, speedway fans or councillors or planning officers or developers is that this is a quirky site because of that chunk within Wandsworth which gives that borough's council the chance to at least challenge anything Merton might have appeared to steam-roll through. So any comment from councillors or officials over in Wandsworth does remain relevant until any challenges they choose to make have been debated and decided upon. By all means celebrate football's upper hand at this stage if that's your outlook but you're wonderfully betraying your ignorance by not having a clue about Wandsworth's relevance to the Wimbledon Stadium site.

Perhaps the most significant date currently published for anything to do with this saga is that Sky's upcoming greyhound schedule includes its annual trip for Swindon's biggest dog race of the year, the Arc final, on Wednesday 23rd March 2016. (Swindon picked up the Arc competition from its traditional home at Walthamstow when that track closed in August 2008). This date was published in the last week of September this year, a fortnight before the Swindon Robins staged the extravaganza billed as speedway's farewell to the current stadium. http://www.racingpost.com/news/greyhounds/bags-tv-green-light-for-2016-derby-double-header/1962763/top/ Even if the new stadium does get built, it's just about impossible for it to be ready for that Sky date in just over 4 months' time given it hasn't even begun to be built yet. Hence Sky must be anticipating setting up their cameras for that Arc final around the current dog track rather than a new one ... what's more, they'd be turning up to that current dog track only 2 days before one of the most lucrative days of the year for Elite League speedway because it's a very early Easter in 2016 and so Good Friday crops up on Friday 25th March !! So well done to anyone involved with speedway at Swindon for managing to hype-up and stage a supposed farewell to the current speedway track around a fortnight AFTER it had already been announced elsewhere that Swindon would be welcoming Sky's greyhound coverage during the early stages of the next speedway season !!

Wonderfully ambitious but almost certainly financially reckless to try to run two Kent teams in separate leagues with at least some weeks where there would be both a Monday and a Friday meeting. It's easy for loads of enthusiastic supporters to tell promoters that they want to come along to more meetings and therefore love the prospect of cheering on two home teams during the following season. But remember this is an area still getting used again to having any home team to support, never mind two at the same track. When that following season actually takes place, it soon becomes obvious that relatively few supporters have both enough time and enough money to actually turn up to all those meetings they told the promoters the previous autumn they'd love to attend !! Instead, you'll find plenty of supporters with enough time to attend all the meetings but not enough spare cash to fund all of them ... and plenty of supporters who can pay for all the meetings but whose work/life balance limits them to fitting only one home meeting into each week plus the very occasional second meeting in any week if it's a big enough attraction. Trouble is, by the time the promoters yet again discover the sequence I've just described, they're committed to the costs of staging all those meetings those supporters told them they'd love to attend only to find the cash or time obstacles in due course !! Even Matt Ford couldn't justify the cost of running the Bournemouth Buccaneers as a second home team when the huge Poole fan base didn't turn up in anything like enough numbers for National League action. Coventry and King's Lynn deserve huge praise for continuing to run EL and NL teams simultaneously while Rye House have had their "on-off" history of combining PL-Rockets and NL-Raiders but the sport's littered with clubs (or an ex-club) who found out painfully that it doesn't pay to host twin teams ... see any of Edinburgh, Newcastle, Newport, Plymouth, Poole, Redcar, Scunthorpe, Sheffield or Swindon who've all made great efforts to add a second home team to their respective clubs over the past 15 years but all ended up with the harsh financial reality of continuing only one home team despite often having far longer developed current fan bases than the Kent operation currently holds. PS ... what prize do I win for relevantly chucking Matt Ford's name into this thread ? !!

That matches up with my understanding that the Devils' link to Colin Hill's legacy only dates from former Exeter team manager David Short becoming heavily involved at Plymouth once Mike Bowden was no longer in charge.

There might have been some sort of similar rule in operation around the late 1970's (my involvement only goes back as far as 1988) but in more recent seasons until this year, Swedish riders missing Tuesday or Thursday action over here for domestic Elit or Allsvenskan action back in their homeland haven't had guest or rider replacement facilities in this country. It's why Workington were always so keen to be one of the Isle of Wight's earliest League visitors in late-April when Daniel Nermark was in the Comets' line-up so that they could get their only Tuesday away-meeting out of the way before his Elit schedule began in early-May.

Once it became clear there was no immediate solution to reviving speedway in Exeter, at least the option of diverting any of his legacy towards Plymouth could be regarded as propping up speedway within Exeter's home county of Devon.

Easy to jump to that conclusion but it's probably nearer the truth to note that nothing much can happen while Galliard Homes so stubbornly refuse to consider selling the Oxford site (and Wimbledon as well) for others to develop or restore ... it appears their prime tactic at the moment is to simply drag out the respective situations at both those stadiums for as long as possible. Perhaps that's so that they can showcase what they could do with either site once they've got stuck into the current West Ham United ground at Upton Park in about a year's time because football's Hammers move into the Olympic Stadium next summer, leaving Galliard to build over 800 residences at Upton Park which will be nearly as many as they've proposed for the Oxford and Wimbledon sites put together.

Great to see there's still enthusiasm for speedway in Exeter ... but frighteningly naïve if they're reckoning they need only £100,000 in start-up money !! Just the most routine of planning permission fees, then an air/foam-fence, the initial building of the track base and the shale for its racing surface, the BSPA-bond and the SCB-licences will rattle through at least half (and probably much more) of that 100-grand and that's before you add in anything like the most basic of pits or spectator facilities !! At least £200,000 would be a much more realistic start-up target, especially (as far as I'm aware, like "SCB" above) that Plymouth have absolutely galloped through whatever was still left from the legacy of former Falcons promoter Colin Hill after his death in 2004.

Both any stadium announcer and any centre-green mic-man are licenced officials ("announcer" is one of the categories of SCB licencing just like "timekeeper", "starting marshal" or "pits marshal") ... and yes, there is room for referees to warn or even fine such announcers if they deem it appropriate. Glasgow's centre-green announcer for many years, Michael Max, had a spell of several seasons where he stayed away from that duty if a particular referee was in charge at Ashfield after he was fined by that ref for having the nerve to correctly quote the rulebook over his microphone to the crowd to prove the ref had just got a decision wrong !! !!

Thanks for the informative reply. Still think you're going a bit over the top by reckoning one illegal but allowed-to-stand ride makes a mockery of the sport given speedway seems to have an inexhaustible supply of ways to make a mockery of itself !!

Hopefully Thursday's clanger finally spells the end of Dave Dowling's refereeing career ... he's been a loyal servant to speedway for many years but that's not enough on its own to justify him having been allowed to remain a referee way beyond his sell-by date for that important responsibility. I've seen him provide holiday-cover as Scunthorpe's Clerk of the Course so there's no reason why he (or speedway as a whole) couldn't channel his enthusiasm into being the roving holiday-cover for that role at several tracks within easy reach of his Bradford base. He baffled absolutely everybody (riders, managers, spectators, the whole lot !!) with his handling of the Newcastle-Redcar League Cup meeting a few months ago and he's always been utterly hopeless when it comes to crossing his fingers and hoping the weather stays ok for a rain-threatened meeting when it would make much better financial sense to call it off ... I've even seen him abandoning a meeting after one bend (yes, not even a lap or a race !!) after being ridiculously optimistic that the weather would work out fine. I don't often disagree with "racers and royals" (and we've swapped notes on various incidents in the past) but on this occasion I think the right decision has been reached to let the result stand because any protest came well after the several windows in which it could correctly have been made (firstly pre-meeting, secondly once Kus was declared on a tactical for heat 8 and thirdly once he'd put the 8-1 on the board but before the tapes rose for heat 9). There'll be plenty of football matches in the upcoming season where the ref and his assistants make what's easily proven by replays to be a clanger (striker at least a yard offside when he scores, foul committed a yard outside the 18-yard box but penalty awarded, handball awarded when it's clearly only hit the defender's chest or face, etc) but everyone accepts that unless there are very exceptional circumstances, the clanger stands unless it's immediately corrected before the game continues into its next phase. Indeed, both NFL and rugby league regard it as a normal aspect of the game for the attacking team to hurry into their next play and get it underway if they reckon they're getting away with something dodgy on their previous play ... once that next play's underway, the previous dodginess becomes irrelevant and it's totally accepted that it's the defensive team's responsibility to get the ref to delay the action in such situations. Somerset had ample chances to avoid being on the wrong end of that illegal 8-1 and didn't take them ... that's their lesson to take from this omnishambles and given how easy it is for the general public to look up the current greensheets on the BSPA website, it's not much to expect every team manager to double-check the opposition's figurework in the final moments before a meeting even when there's a late and unexpected case of r/r like Jan Graversen's absence on this occasion. If you can't cope with controversial results occasionally skewering what you think should be the correct league table, then don't get involved in any sport in the first place because you're bound to end up crying at some stage. Finally, a question for "lucifer sam" ... if Scunthorpe (or Oxford in the past) innocently benefit from a refereeing clanger, how quickly do you insist the scoreline must be corrected to reflect the situation ? !! By all means whinge about other results affecting your team providing you're also keen to hand back any presents you've similarly received !!

Just two National League meetings today claimed 7 potential stand-ins between them for Benko !! Former Berwick reserve Liam Carr was Buxton's number-5 at home to a Stoke side featuring Teessider Danny Phillips (#4) and former Belle Vue reserve Lee Payne (#5) who guested for Somerset's Benji Compton on Friday plus Ryan MacDonald (#6) who's also made the odd Premier League appearance on northern tracks. Meanwhile,recent Newcastle guest Luke Riddick along with Berwick's regular number-8 Stefan Farnaby were both busy for Mildenhall at home to a Cradley line-up including former Scunthorpe reserve Matt Williamson. That little lot would have wiped out at least half of Plymouth's more realistic options for covering the deeply unfortunate circumstances of the Benko bereavement.

It's been bought by Galliard Homes for a redevelopment which they'll also use as a showcase for what they could do with the Wimbledon Stadium site (which they've effectively owned for about a decade) given the right planning permission.

Top marks to Paul Burbidge's effort to report on the repeated "excessive moisture" problems of the dodgier temporary tracks over the SGP years, even if plenty of major football stadia groundsmen could have said much the same as far back as 20 years ago or longer !! Once it became more fashionable for new sports stadiums (or revamps of existing venues) to wrap their seating round the whole playing arena (instead of having four separate stands along each side/end with relatively open corners), the groundsmen soon discovered how much tougher it was to keep the more sheltered parts of their pitch in good condition because it was now so much harder for the breezy and sunlight aspects of their pitch maintenance to help out with the temperature aspect of it. It's why many stadiums built from the 1990's onwards have either a clear panel built into the southern roof of their stands (to refract more sunlight onto the pitch) or a couple of ground-level large ventilation shafts that double-up as emergency exits for on-the-pitch fans at rock concerts ... for example, Sunderland's Stadium of Light which opened in 1997 has both those features (clear southern roof plus south-west & north-west shafts) which is why it's allowed a 55,000 capacity for rock gigs despite the stage reducing its seating capacity from 48,000 to only 40,000. But as soon as you try to put a temporary speedway track into a modern football or rugby stadium you're automatically putting one of sport's most weather-dependent playing surfaces into one of sport's most climate-regulated locations ... that's ok providing the temporary track is in ideal condition as it's installed but, as Gelsenkirchen proved (and Cardiff 2013 very narrowly avoided), a damp/dodgy track has almost no chance of being salvaged given the stadium architecture into which it's been plonked !! Next time Tottenham are at home you'll see how hard they find it to maintain any grass on their pitch along its whole southern goal-line (left end as the tv-coverage shows it) ever since White Hart Lane became all-seater and fully-enclosed because that area misses any sunlight ... if they can't do any better with all-year-round access to that area of their pitch, it's no wonder any temporary speedway track is going to struggle to bed-in properly in just a few days !! If Ole Olsen or BSI or anyone else involved in SGP meetings is always going to ignore this crucial aspect of the pitch-level climate of most major stadiums, then you're inevitably going to get more fiascos in the future to add to Gelsenkirchen, Warsaw, etc.

It was mentioned a few posts earlier on this thread that Steve's partner has gone into labour, prompting the request for "rider replacement" that's been granted. In recent years, the BSPA have usually granted a facility when requested to cope with either an impending birth or a family bereavement ... in a case like Steve Worrall's where 2 different league titles are still at stake with Edinburgh & Cradley (and a 3rd title chance via Swindon ended only a few days ago), I suspect either Steve himself or his various promoters would have done the preliminary work of notifying the BSPA a few weeks ago of the baby's due date (ready for actually applying for any facility when it became appropriate) rather than waiting until just a few hours before Steve becomes a father to start requesting anything !!

I'll stand by what I posted earlier today based upon my family's deep financial background, my own degree in Economics & Statistics, over 20 years involved in all sorts of aspects of speedway and over 10 years working professionally within a combination of greyhound racing and the bookmaking industry. One other point worth adding on this thread (as opposed to the mentions I've given about it on the Wimbledon and Oxford threads on this forum in recent months) ... It would be far harder for the GRA to close Perry Barr than any of their other dog-tracks even if they reckoned the greyhounds at Perry Barr weren't profitable because they run this stadium in a leisure-economics partnership with Birmingham City Council instead of still owning freehold-rights (Wimbledon) or having recently privately-sold the freehold-rights (Hall Green & Belle Vue) to make a dent in their multi-million-pound debts from a decade ago to various Irish banks. That's why the Brummies' demise under the Phillips-regime is arguably even more appalling than any other recent speedway closure because it's happened at a track that's just about as safe as possible among rented-stadiums from any redevelopment threat !!