arthur cross

Totally understandable that the greyhound industry defiantly wants to remain the primary sport at Wimbledon Stadium and Monday's event at City Hall should present that defiance to a wider audience in a very good light. But a "Show of Passion" still does nothing to solve the overwhelming problem for those working within greyhound racing, namely their paymaster at Wimbledon Stadium still owes many millions of pounds (that are well overdue) relating to their existing use of that site.

West Ham United very much talking up their deal with Galliard as a 3-way partnership between themselves, Galliard & Newham Council to make sure there are plenty of footballing tributes built into the housing redevelopment of the current ground (a statue of Bobby Moore plus each of the housing blocks or streets having footballing titles). I don't know which company did the housing redevelopment of Highbury around a decade ago after Arsenal's move to the Emirates Stadium but that was done very neatly with the pitch area turned into a smart communal garden for the flats built where the four stands previously stood (as some of those stands were listed buildings, much of the outside decoration of those stands had to remain intact) ... reveloping Upton Park doesn't look so tricky because I don't think there are any listed buildings in the way of a complete demolition of the current stadium. So that's now one London borough council (Newham) clearly linking up with Galliard, another London borough council (Merton) supposed to still look impartial about Wimbledon Stadium's future but seemingly leaning towards Galliard (certainly according to most greyhound observers) but Oxford City Council remaining downright comtemptuous of Galliard's plans for what happens next at their local dogs/speedway venue. The key difference ... Galliard reckon there's room for 700 new residences at Upton Park and 600 at Plough Lane (both commanding inner-London-suburb property prices) so that's a lot more prospective council tax from those sites compared to just the 220 new residences Galliard want to build in one of Oxford's relatively poorer suburbs.

Perhaps yes for a general measurement of any speedway noise drifting towards any housing estate at least a few hundred yards away from a track ... however, probably not by a wide enough margin to prevent it still being regarded as "very noisy" if you live somewhere overlooking a track on a combined stadium/housing estate.

A very fair assessment of how heavily the odds are stacked against speedway, stocks or bangers ... they've all been dumped into this gloomy situation because the main use of the stadium has been entrenched for so long in debts so heavy that significant house-building (with its obvious bad side-effect for any motorsport) appears by far the most likely way of repaying those debts. Certainly the motorsports (even collectively) don't have enough financial clout to really help resolve those debts in return for a better chance of having a future on the site. My own contributions to this thread are much more a way of explaining the depth of the stadium's problems to speedway fans likely to be unfamiliar with the greyhound racing, football or local politics ... I don't have a wonderfully radlcal answer to help return speedway to Wimbledon and, sadly but realistically, nor does anyone else either.

Michael, I appreciate you saying my posts are "truly great about what's going on" and that you like to be as optimistic as possible ... but in this case will you please respect my view that, in reality, you're being hopelessly optimistic with regard to the future of the Wimbledon Stadium site as well as still dreadfully struggling to grasp the current situation there (especially the financial side). You say "I hope that Merton Council don't allow planning permission for houses" but no-one has yet offered any other sort of realistic way to raise the multi-millions that keep appearing to be needed (and increasingly urgently) by the current owners of the site, Galliard, to pay off the Irish banks wanting their overdue loans back from a decade ago. Merton Council have made it clear that a crowd-attracting sporting venue must feature in any redevelopment of the site ... but, like everyone else who's studied this saga realistically, they regard house-building on part of the site as the only way to payback fairly quickly at least a hefty chunk of the multi-millions. As long as the Irish debt agency Nama remain supportive of Galliard's plans rather than any other option, then Galliard's solution of 600 homes plus a football stadium for AFC Wimbledon remains the clear favourite. If Nama finally lose all patience with Galliard (thus forcing Galliard to flog the site to another bidder as their only remaining way to pay back any of the Irish debt), the only other option fully planned out is Paschal Taggart's solution of a 21st-century revamping of greyhound racing but even his project includes 400-to-450 houses ... and a big part of his reputation within that sport is based on his revamping of Dublin's Shelbourne Park that involved turning the land beyond the first/second bends and the first-half of the back-straight into smart apartments. No exact figures have emerged about how many millions Nama still require from Galliard but we do know £50-million was the purchase-price around a decade ago when the Greyhound Racing Association operations last changed ownership on the open market ... given several recent ways Nama have seemed to raise their pressure on Galliard, £10-million would seem to me to be the minimum fair estimate of what's still owed and I wouldn't be surprised if it was over £20-million. It isn't speedway's fault that such a big debt continues to hang over the existing use of the site ... but even an Elite League club operating there wouldn't reach a turnover of £1-million a year and therefore speedway offers a tiny fraction of the overall solution to anyone trying to resolve the current multi-million debt (never mind then sorting out any noise-level issues in the future). There is absolutely no point hoping AFC Wimbledon might like to plan a stadium around football and speedway ... because it won't be AFC Wimbledon's decision about how that new stadium takes shape !! AFC Wimbledon will simply be Galliard's tenants in a rectangular-field stadium that's part of Galliard's overall sport/housing plan and that shape is vital because it requires a smaller area of the site to be used for the sporting playing area (plus the spectator facilities) and therefore leaves a bigger area of the site to be used for extra housing that will help pay off more of the multi-millions (and, longer-term, generate extra council tax revenue) ... all AFC Wimbledon are doing in this is taking lucky advantage of being the ideal team to fit into a new stadium that lets Galliard tick Merton Council's box for keeping a sporting community-use within the redeveloped site. There are only 2 ways speedway can co-exist with a football/rugby pitch ... either, speedway temporarily lays its track within the rectangular confines of the pitch (limiting the size of the track to Cardiff's 285-metres for the British-GP or a similar length at Copenhagen's Parken for the Danish-GP) or it has a permanent track around the pitch with the bends of the track curving past the football corner-flags. The huge cost of laying and removing a temporary track can only be justified for occasional meetings (usually just once-a-year) in any stadium already big enough to host international events ... AFC Wimbledon's new home wouldn't be anywhere near that big and any Wimbledon speedway promoter would want to keeping relaying the track plenty of times a year so the costs of linking up like this are utterly impossible. Meanwhile, a permanent speedway track around AFC Wimbledon's pitch forces a bigger floor area for the stadium (notably wasting two big empty semi-circles in between the speedway bends and the football goalmouths) and thus reducing the area of the site still available for housing ... that's why the Taggart plan has at least 150 fewer houses than the Galliard plan because the greyhound track also needs the oval shape that uses up more sporting floor space. Hence any request by speedway to join in with Galliard's football option would be laughed at by Galliard unless speedway's paying several million pounds up front to compensate for the reduced number of new houses caused by speedway's inclusion ... that's why speedway's better (but still tiny) hope is to find a way of being included with the greyhounds because the greyhound-revamping will then be footing the bill for the extra sporting floor space it also needs (although also including enough new houses to give speedway a noise-level nightmare). As usual, thanks for reading all of this ... and as I've mentioned before, anyone speculating on "what happens next" with this site must understand that, first of all, just Nama and Galliard must finally resolve between themselves "what happens with the multi-millions still owed now", And Michael, I hope we can find a way for your enthusiasm and optimism about speedway in general to match up with speedway's realistic place within the Wimbledon Stadium saga.

But the vast majority of horse racing or greyhound bets refer to just a single race within a longer meeting (and very few of them cover the entire meeting) so it's easier to charge punters per streamed-race ... surely it would be different for speedway where there's more likelihood of punters wanting to place a bet on a team to win the meeting that would then entitle them to watch all 15 heats for the price of their single bet because (when they're placing that bet) each of those 15 races could have an impact on their bet.

I agree with BWitcher that you're unlikely to see speedway in among the evening racing on the main At The Races channel on the Sky/Virgin platforms as ATR has long had enough American tracks (plus the top Canadian track Woodbine) to complement its UK/Irish floodlit or spring/summer-daylit evening action ... instead, ATR will offer its betting partners the option of the speedway coverage for them to stream on their individual websites. But this looks to me like a deal that far more benefits ATR than British speedway, especially given Terry Russell's admittance that no revenue is initially guaranteed for the Elite/Premier clubs whose meetings will sometimes be streamed ... ATR simply wants cheap access through its Sport Mediastream division to different sporting action that it can then offer to its betting partners but whether that will generate worthwhile income for British speedway is much harder to prove, Not for the first time, British speedway is chasing betting-related income that I simply doubt exists on anything like the scale it's hoping for. Remember the green helmet colour (instead of white) was introduced about a decade ago to match all 4 speedway riders' helmets to the colour buttons of a Sky remote-control which could then be used to create a split-screen on your tv between the live action and a range of betting options. It was a great idea in theory ... but in practice, the delays transferring from full-screen action to split-screen action-&-odds infuriated punters (regardless of which sport they wanted to bet on) who soon abandoned betting via their tv-screen in favour of keeping that tv-screen fully devoted to the action while also using a laptop (and now often these days, a tablet or mobile) fully devoted to their betting, thus rendering the switch to a green helmet pointless. It's all very well saying that the speedway line-ups will be known two days in advance to help punters work out their bets ... yes, that's the case in terms of teams declaring their 1-to-7 for each meeting but we all know there are plenty of occasions when a crash from the previous night affect those pre-declared line-ups ... what's more, once the meeting's underway, heat line-ups can be changed at just a couple of minutes' notice, radically altering any previously-advertised odds for that race if a hot reserve comes in for a struggling middle-order rider ... and I defy anyone to accurately explain the effect of rider-replacement on betting activity !! In comparison, any reserves coming into Irish horse racing or British greyhound racing are confirmed at the start of a meeting so (unless they affect the first race on the card) those alterations are always available to the bookies and their punters with much more notice than news of a speedway change just as the referee fires the 2-minute warning. But the 2 biggest concerns I'd have are as follows ... firstly, speedway is way down the list of the most profitable sports for bookmakers because most of the betting it generates comes from "shrewd money" (keen followers of it) rather than "mug money" (the general public just wanting the buzz of having a bet to add to their enjoyment of something they'd be watching anyway) ... hence if Terry Russell's right about no betting-revenue for speedway being guaranteed from this project, good luck to the clubs waiting for their share of any handsome profits from the bookies. And secondly, potentially disastrously for some clubs whose attendances are already borderline, it's unlikely these betting websites will require you to bet more than £5 at a time to view the live action (and as Grand Central has pointed out, it can be as little as 50p for other sports). I appreciate some folk may not want to attach any of their bank cards to an account on a betting website for fear of affecting their credit rating for their everyday life ... but if you're ok about that dilemma, picture the scene on a drizzly day a couple of hours before your team's home meeting is due to start and you know it's being live-streamed. Until now, you've had to gamble on whether it's worth any transport/parking costs plus the admission fee against the risk of a wasted journey or an abandoned/farcical meeting ... now, incredibly, a gambling company will let you avoid all the stress of that previous gamble for just a few quid (maybe as little as 50p) so that's ridiculously cheap insurance against the dodgy weather compared to those transport/parking/admission costs !! Unless you can't help betting badly on every race, you end up spending a lot less than you would've done by going to the track while ATR and its betting partners have the chance to share their costs/profits of any betting money you've lost before finally sending a slice of any of their profits towards British speedway. Can you see that slice being enough compensation for the clubs to set against the turnstile-income they've lost from those who've now been given such a cheap and easy alternative to setting-off for a meeting amid dodgy weather ? !! - - - - - - - - - - Since I started writing this post, Reliant Robin has posted that speedway is only "playing catch up with other sports" in terms of streaming its live action ... to a large degree that's correct but, crucially, very few of those other sports (maybe only cricket) are quite as weather-dependent as speedway and therefore at such serious risk from its stadium-spectators making a late decision not to turn up when conditions are bad. It's also the case that most live-streaming on betting websites (or live-pictures in betting shops) is either foreign action (to allow almost 24/7 betting to suit punters' own spare time) whose crowds we wouldn't be joining anyway or domestic action that's long since stopped relying on needing live-spectator income because it gets a guaranteed fee from the bookies (like mundane midweek horse-racing and all greyhound action). But British speedway appears happy to chase unguaranteed betting-revenue while agreeing to give its more weather-fickle supporters a staggeringly easy incentive to stay at home ... even by its usual standards, this looks to me to be a crazily stupid route to take.

As "salty" rightly says, no significant news in the last few days and Merton Council's report into the recent 2-day planning hearing is due around April. But some other key dates to note are the local council elections on 22nd May and the final of the Greyhound Derby on 31st May. As Merton's a London borough, all the council seats are contested in one go every 4 years (unlike most of the rest of England where a third of the local council seats are contested each year on a 3-year rotation) ... in the couple of wards nearest Wimbledon Stadium, any candidate's bound to be asked for his/her preference for the site but as the stadium's tucked into the northern edge of the borough, many of Merton's wards are at least a couple of miles from the site and therefore hardly affected by any traffic implications or changing use of the site. In those more distant wards, there may well be more AFC Wimbledon supporters than regular greyhound spectators (the Racing Post article linked by "salty" above readily admits the greyhound crowd is probably drawn from a wider catchment area than the potential football crowd) and while Merton Council is supposed to be collectively impartial, there's nothing to stop individual candidates (including current councillors seeking re-election) favouring one side or the other while canvassing for votes based on what they think will appeal most in their ward. The last big sporting influence I remember on a London local election was the Vote For The Valley group of Charlton Athletic supporters in 1990 when their football team was renting Selhurst Park (and later Upton Park) while their own ground remained derelict ... a Valley candidate, standing against a Greenwich councillor stubbornly opposing any efforts to revive Charlton's ground, won a famous victory at the polls that certainly helped the club's return to its true home and the subsequent revamping of it into today's 27,000 all-seater stadium. It showed how a specific local sporting matter close to the heart of enough residents could trample over the usual party-politics ... however, for all the enthusiasm of the We Want Wimbledon campaign and the Show of Passion in a fortnight's time, I don't think the future use of Wimbledon Stadium is ever going to have as big an electoral impact as that 1990 Charlton vote. (By the way, the local elections are usually on the opening Thursday of May but this year have been delayed so that they're held on the same day as the European Parliament elections, thus making sure two traditionally low-turnout elections require only one day's closure of schools and village halls for polling stations and one shift of ballot-counters for the results.) Meanwhile, as it's an even-numbered year and therefore an international football tournament year (World Cup this time in 2014, next Euros in 2016, etc.), the four weeks it takes to work through the six rounds of the Greyhound Derby are in May this year, leading up to the final on the 31st (whereas the 2013 Derby was staged in its traditional odd-year four-week span last June) ... the logic is that while June's the perfect time for drawing the biggest crowds on warm evenings well before the start of the school holidays, any likely benefit from that better weather gets demolished by the counter-attraction of watching the football at home or down the pub, hence the Derby's run in May in even-numbered years. But it's only once every 20 years that the 5-year-term of the European Parliament clashes with (and slightly delays) the 4-year-term of London Borough local elections ... when it does, it's in an even-numbered year so it's a May-running of the Greyhound Derby. All of which has created a very rare instance here in 2014 of the local elections and the Derby final being only 9 days' apart, just when the future of Wimbledon Stadium is at a critical stage only a few weeks after the scheduled announcement of Merton's recent planning hearings. While the efforts of everyone in the We Want Wimbledon campaign are wonderfully enthusiastic, anything they do still isn't getting round the on-going saga of Galliard struggling to repay Nama the Irish multi-millions ... meanwhile, for Nama's judgement of how much further pressure to apply, it must be useful for them to be able to wait only 9 more days after the council elections to get by far the current stadium's biggest event of the year out of the way as well. The potential greyhound-racing revamper Paschal Taggart admitted on his recent appearance on Racing Post Greyhound-TV that he seriously fears this May's Derby will be the last to be run at Wimbledon ... if even he's that worried, it wouldn't surprise me at all if Nama get really stroppy in June or July after this quick sequence of planning-report, local elections and Derby final. In the last couple of years, the Greyhound Racing Association have willingly transferred most of Wimbledon's other big annual races elsewhere, notably moving the Oaks (the bitches-only classic run every December) to fellow-GRA track Belle Vue while letting the Grand National go to Sittingbourne (a non-GRA venue) to form a double-bill with their Kent Derby. Once Wimbledon's staged the Derby Final on 31st May, its only remaining big events would seem to be the late-summer Puppy Derby (that seemed unlikely to be held last year until a generous local sponsor emerged) and the Springbok (the country's major novice hurdle) whose 2014-edition is in a few weeks' time and so wouldn't be on the calendar again until Feb/March 2015 giving ample time for it to be moved. As usual, thanks for reading this ... I wish I could provide more positive news beyond the enthusiasm of the We Want Wimbledon campaigners but there's relentless gloom for the dogs (and therefore, probably speedway as well) everywhere else in this story at the moment. PS ... am I the only one wondering whether the greyhound community could have chosen a better title than "Show of Passion" for their upcoming day at City Hall given they want to attract the support of a Mayor of London for whom "Show of Passion" probably means something entirely different judging by the reputation of his private life !!

Yes, the stadium's only about 20 years old and, as far as I know, isn't currently in any great significant use. But good luck to anyone hoping to put speedway into it. For a start, you'd struggle to fit in a track much bigger than 250 metres ... don't forget, the Grand Prix track at Cardiff's Millennium Stadium is only 285 metres and that fits into a floor space helped by the slightly bigger dimensions of a rugby union pitch whereas there's very little room at Nene Park between the stands and the football pitch so that certainly means you're dealing with a smaller floor space. While there aren't any houses immediately adjacent to Nene Park, most of Irthlingborough's housing is easily within a mile of it ... admittedly, all the houses are to the west of the stadium so most of the time the prevailing wind would take the speedway noise away from the town but it would still be a huge battle regarding noise regulations to establish a new speedway venue so close to Irthlingborough's amount of housing. Meanwhile, the main A6 road to the west of the stadium and the industrial estate to the south-east make it unlikely you could create much extra space for a bigger track by knocking down the existing stands and starting again with an empty site. Finally, from where are you going to get enough of a crowd to make speedway at Nene Park profitable ? !! ... the stadium's a "white elephant" to some extent because its construction (and indeed the whole Rushden & Diamonds FC project) was funded by Max Griggs thanks to his multi-million-pound connections with Dr Martens shoes/boots. The local towns of Wellingborough, Irthlingborough and Rushden wouldn't normally be considered anywhere near big enough to justify having a Football League club and they've no history of backing any other local sports team either so you're then needing to draw a hefty chunk of your home crowd from either Northampton or Kettering which are both around 20 minutes' drive away. But that means competing for spectators with all of Northampton Saints rugby union (former Heineken European Cup winners), Northampton Town FC and Northants county cricket. All in all, nice little stadium but surely there must be better potential sites for speedway elsewhere.

It's whatever night suits Sky best to fill their schedule with a live event when their higher-profile sports are quieter ... they do the same with most of their scheduling of roughly 30 greyhound nights. Judging by last season, they preferred Mondays (sometimes alongside live Premier League football) during the football season to leave Tuesdays and Wednesdays clear for the Champions League. But in the football off-season, they made a big thing of shifting live Super League rugby into Monday nights and that's when they often shifted the speedway into Tuesdays or Wednesdays to give them a live event on those nights. Tuesdays are awkward for our Elite League because of clashing with the weekly round of the Swedish Elit so that's why our Premier League tended to get a few of those slots. It's only rarely that Sky have ever used Thursdays or Fridays for speedway as that's the point each week where a hefty chunk of their evening schedules go to golf (either Euro highlights or live US action).

I'm certainly not of the opinion that we should "never talk about it" ... all I'm trying to point out is just how massively uphill a battle speedway faces to get itself heard in any useful way regarding the dreadful current financial mess at Wimbledon. Therefore, while it would be great to see speedway return to one of its most famous London venues, there surely needs to be a realistic view about the small chance of this happening, if only so that valuable time, energy and money among London speedway fans is directed towards any other projects that might benefit better from being pursued instead of nostalgically hoping for anything at Wimbledon.

You're still not getting it, are you Michael ? !! ... speedway's got virtually no hope of influencing Nama's thoughts on what happens in the future at Wimbledon. Nama are getting increasingly impatient about reclaiming multi-millions either directly from Galliard's own development or another company buying out Galliard ... you say "we need a plan to get speedway at Wimbledon if that means going in with someone else" but even an Elite League speedway club is unilkely to want (or be able to afford) to pay more than about £100,000 of stadium-rent a year so good luck waving that amount of money on speedway's behalf with any impact when it's going to be a tiny drop in helping out another bidder trying to cobble together the multi-millions needed for the whole project !! Maybe it was easier a decade ago to get Irish banks rather than British banks to loan the multi-millions for a British greyhound operation because of the better general knowledge of greyhound racing among the Irish ... but after the worldwide 2008 financial crash (which hit the Irish banks even more than the British banks), that better knowledge of greyhound racing among the Irish is now largely irrelevant to the more important matter for those Irish banks (via Nama) to get back as much of those multi-millions as possible (and preferably, as quickly as possible). Yes, Nama is an Irish organization but all the current indications (thanks to it still seeming to back Galliard's future plan despite the current debt) are that it won't prioritize showing any sentimental sympathy to a popular Irish sport when it comes to recovering any money trapped at Wimbledon. Like any potential speedway team, AFC Wimbledon can't afford to buy the site on their own (even if it wasn't currently affected by the existing debt) ... but as sporting tenants, they're probably the best fit financially . Just a football pitch or just a 300-metre speedway track would take up roughly the same size of floor-space and spectator-space (therefore leaving roughly the same amount of housing space) ... but the football club's turnover (probably between £2-million and £5-million a year) would enable them to afford a much bigger rent than even an Elite League speedway club (probably turning over between £500,000 and £1-million a season). Alternatively, if speedway fitted its track inside a new dog track, then the problem is that the oval shape of a 400-metre dog track uses a lot more floor-space and therefore reduces the housing space which is key to the whole project, not only for generating plenty of millions straight away from the house-buyers but also for generating lots of council tax for Merton Council (who while they have to appear open-minded to any interested bidders at the moment, surely also must be doing their sums about what each bidder's plans mean for their future council tax revenue !!). AFC Wimbledon's new ground appears to suit Galliard and Nama best at the moment ... it involves around 600 houses which would generate roughly £1-million a year in council tax. Paschal Taggart's greyhound-revamp features only around 400-to-450 houses, immediately knocking at least £250,000 a year off the future council tax revenue (and the Taggart-plan has never seemed to have factored-in solving the existing multi-millions of debt as part of purchasing the site) ... judging by every recent indication, Nama's number-crunchers definitely don't regard the Taggart-plan to be as helpful to them as the AFC-plan while Merton Council's number-crunchers seem to be desperately biting their lip that they also reckon the AFC-plan suits them better because we're still at the stage where they're supposed to be impartial. To give you an idea of the relative financial clout of greyhounds and speedway, I know of one long-established joint-stadium of both sports where the annual rent paid by the speedway club is usually about the same as just a fortnight's worth of that track's income from the tv-fees it gets from the nation's betting-shops !! ... it's a battle for speedway to get heard at all amid that heavily-imbalanced situation, never mind getting anything to go in speedway's favour.

Nice idea from "michaelcroucher" for speedway fans to get directly in touch with Nama to show how Nama can get some of their money back from speedway. But the brutal truth is that the entire turnover of the Wimbledon Dons a few years ago in the Conference League was probably around £100,000 a year while it's very likely Nama are still trying to get back at least £10-million for their Irish banks and maybe even £20-million-plus. It was reported that £50-million was the price-tag when Risk Capital bought Wembley-plc about a decade ago which has effectively proved to be Risk/Galliard buying the GRA (see my earlier lengthy explanation on this thread about how Wembley-plc swallowed up the GRA from the late-1980's to the mid-2000's) ... it's also clear that a hefty chunk of that purchase-price has ended up being funded by the Irish bank loans to Risk/Galliard that are now being chased by Nama but we don't know exactly how hefty a chunk (hence my estimate above of anything from £10-million to £20-million-plus). Speedway's potential to clear up Nama's debt-collecting from Galliard is tiny, bordering on nothing. The only reason there's more hope for speedway at Oxford is that the gap between that stadium's greyhound turnover and speedway turnover isn't so wide as would be the case at Wmbledon, therefore speedway offers a bigger percentage chunk within the overall turnover of any revival of Oxford Stadium ... however, the smaller size and lower land-values of the Oxford site make it a very small part of the overall GRA picture dominated by the larger size and higher land-values of the Wimbledon site It still seems some folk on this forum simply don't understand (or can't get their head round) just how deep the financial mess is regarding the existing (mostly greyhound) use of Wimbledon Stadium ... mind you, many greyhound folk are just as much in denial over this matter while the Racing Post's "let be as optimistic wherever possible" editorial attitiude has just about reached the level of barrel-scraping. In my view, it's clear that Nama, for all their frustrations with Galliard's repayment delays over recent years, still accept teaming-up with Galliard for any future development of the site is the best (or least-bad) way forward, mailny because no other outside bidder has yet come up with enough funding to pay off Nama as well as buying the site off Galliard, I reckon Paschal Taggart has known he's been on the losing side since about last October, let alone his gloomy outlook this week. He was the ideal man for British greyhound racing to cling onto as the figurehead with a good reputation for Wimbledon's future but I think he's realised for some time he's out of his depth for several reasons with this project compared to his impressively successful revamp of Dublin's Shelbourne Park where he had so much more political support automatically in his favour (the Irish President often presents the trophies on their Derby final night) and so much more groundswell support from the general public for overhauling a key part of that country's sporting heritage (the national TV-broadcaster RTE shows an hour-long, 3-race live show from 9pm-10pm on the Saturday of the Irish Derby final each September). Can you imagine any royalty or David Cameron handing out the trophies at Wimbledon as part of live tv-coverage that's always able to bump Casualty off the schedule once a year ? !! ... even the one time a vital World Cup football qualifier for the Republic of Ireland was going to clash with the dogs' final a few years ago, RTE willingly cleared their Friday-night schedule to fit the greyhound coverage there instead !! Perhaps most importantly of all, Mr Taggart had no need to worry about a rival proposal from a football team because the seriously out-of-date Landsdowne Road stadium was only 5-minutes' walk from Shelbourne and was always going to be eventually revamped itself into what's now the 50,000-seater Aviva Stadium on that same site.

It's more the case that £50 notes are still in such limited general circulation that plenty of shopkeepers and checkout-assistants hardly know what the real ones look like, never mind detecting any forgeries !! ... hence it's far safer to refuse them and it's not going to drive many customers away because so few of them are likely to turn up with a £50 note in the first place. Most busy petrol stations will take them as they're clearly more used to transactions where it's sensible to use a £50 note given most cars cost between £60-£80 to fill up ... but given most of our bank cashpoints are designed to only dispense two types of notes after they've been refilled, it's probably still going to be a long time before they move away from usually having the £20/£10 combination and therefore the £50 note will remain a rarity for general use. From my experience at foreign cashpoints, the 50-euro note (about £42) and the 50-Swiss-franc note (about £34) are much more commonplace.

Most big-chain supermarkets' self-service check-out machines accept genuine Scottish notes regardless of whether you're shopping in Scotland or much further south !! It's because these check-out machines in their Scottish branches have to be able to accept both Scottish and Bank of England notes ... and, although they don't advertise the fact, the supermarkets (or their technology-providers) have clearly worked out its more cost-effective to use the same technology in all their machines nationwide rather than develop a second set of note-receivers for England & Wales that would reject the Scottish notes. Tsunami should have no problem bunging Scottish fivers & tenners from his trips to Glasgow & Edinburgh into any check-out machines near Newcastle.

This was how the Racing Post reported Wednesday's opening day of the 2-day Merton Council hearing in Thursday's paper ... understandably, the paper's been keen to emphasise any positive angles throughout this whole saga which makes this particular headline and article all the more downbeat ... http://www.racingpost.com/news/greyhounds/disappointed-taggart-reflects-on-disastrous-meeting/1596969/top/ Paschal Taggart was in an equally gloomy mood on RPG-TV later on Wednesday evening ... within just a couple of minutes of being introduced on the show, he went as far as fearing this May's Greyhound Derby will be the last ever to be staged at Wimbledon as well as describing Merton Council as "clearly biased". Everything in either the above newspaper article or Mr Taggart's appearance on RPG-TV totally seems to back up my earlier explanations on this thread that while Nama still remain keen to do business with Galliard as the best way of getting at least some of the Irish banks' multi-millions back, it's hard to see how anyone else like Mr Taggart can make a breakthrough regarding the future use of the site unless being prepared to bale out Galliard's Irish debts. In any case, from speedway's point of view, I've yet to see any greyhound proposals make a serious inclusion of speedway in their plans despite other uses of the site beyond just the dog-racing getting a mention ... remember, Mr Taggart's plans (loudly supported by Diane McLean's We Want Wimbledon campaign) do mention the continuation of the current few squash courts within some sort of fitness centre in their overall plan but don't mention speedway in the slightest.

Philip ... Given the lack of official announcement from the BSPA or Sky but also given that you feel able to publish the above sentence on a public forum, please would you explain why you're not also publishing the above sentence in this week's Speedway Star given your significant involvement with that magazine. All you're doing at the moment is reinforcing the opinion (rightly or wrongly) of many supporters (and particularly, ex-readers of the Speedway Star like myself) that the Speedway Star has developed a ridiculously cosy editorial stance with the BSPA rather than keeping it on its toes with enough really challenging editorial pieces. Alternatively, given the comments of "Jonny the spud" & "Grand Central" within the last few posts on this thread, how about ringing up a few riders in the next few days, especially towards the lower end of the Elite League averages or the graded-reserves, because it looks like you'll have no problem getting some really good quotes summing up the riders' collective frustration at not being able to give potential sponsors as good an idea as possible of this season's likely TV-exposure. If you do that, you won't have to worry about any continuing deafening silence from Rugby or Isleworth leaving a blank space in next week's magazine because you can fill it with the article I've just suggested instead. What matters more at the Speedway Star ? ... well-researched but sometimes hard-hitting journalism or carefully steering round anything remotely awkward for the BSPA ? By the way, I speak as someone who has stood-in on several occasions over the past decade to supply match-reports or club-columns to the Speedway Star when regular correspondents haven't been available.

If you're hooked up to Sky or Freesat, you're likely to hear plenty about Wimbledon Stadium during tonight's edition of Racing Post Greyhound TV on the Information TV channel (Sky-212, Freesat-401). The guest pundit is Irish greyhounds' most famous administrator Paschal Taggart who's now the figurehead for the possible 21st-century revamp of Wimbledon's existing dog track ... he'll be rounding off his day that's begun with attending the first of the 2-day-hearing at Merton Council into their Sites & Policies Plan where any future use of the Wimbledon Stadium site is high up the agenda. The programme runs from 7.15pm until 11.00pm featuring 12-race cards from both Peterborough and Romford and while that means a live race roughly every 8 minutes, there should still be a couple of minutes between most races for any questions to Mr Taggart (or viewers' e-mails & tweets) ... also, the last live race is the Romford 10.26 which leaves the whole final half-hour available for more discussion about Wimbledon's future.

Have a look on the Wimbledon Stadium thread at my very detailed reply to salty's request for more information about how the Greyhound Racing Association, Risk Capital, Galliard Homes and the Irish debt agency Nama all fit together in the ongoing saga of Wimbledon's (and Oxford's) future. In short, it's very easy to ask "why don't Risk Capital sell up if they can't build houses ?" ... the massive problem (especially at Wimbledon) is that Risk/Galliard still appear to owe multi-millions to Irish banks that they borrowed for their existing ownership of these stadiums. If those multi-millions are a bigger amount than Risk/Galliard can hope to raise from any quick sales (and that seems an increasingly likely scenario), then there's no incentive for Risk/Galliard to sell up because any money they collected would go straight to Nama and they'd still owe the rest of the debt but now without owning anything they were previously using to service that debt !! The generally-held view within greyhound racing is that while all the GRA tracks make enough profit to cope with the interest payments on those Irish loans, those profits aren't enough to make any worthwhile dent in repaying the loans themselves. Any wider way forward at either Oxford or Wimbledon can't start until checking how it fits into any direction Nama & Risk/Galliard have worked out between themselves over those Irish loans. For now, all we know is that in the short-term it suits Risk/Galliard to keep their current greyhound tracks ticking along without further investment as the cheapest/simplest option for keeping up with the interest payments ... meanwhile, Nama still seem to regard working with Risk/Galliard as their best hope of getting as much of their money back as possible (albeit with steadily increasing pressure to hurry up) rather than turning on Galliard and then actively supporting the financial credibility of anyone else's solution.

As you might expect, it's not so much a case of "who owns what" but a tangled mess of "who's really got the biggest clout in sorting out what happens next" ... however (especially upon salty's request !!), here goes with my overall view and I think it'll help to explain a few historical details that will give the current situation a much better context. The Greyhound Racing Association being caught up in a property development saga is nothing new because that was one of their own prime strategies towards running their business in the 1960's and '70s that began well but actually stuck them into a heap of trouble from which they've never fully recovered !! That was the era in which the GRA cottoned-on to the much increased temptation for the general public to "stay at home watching TV" rather than going for a night out to any sporting or social venue so the GRA did its best to snap up not just the most profitable dog tracks at the time but also the dog tracks they reckoned had the best housing-redevelopment value as a useful insurance in case this "stay at home" momentum was permanent. Initially, it looked a shrewd move if you were a GRA shareholder but a callous one if you worked at one of the less development-attractive tracks which were now almost guaranteed to be wound down the moment they weren't profitable rather than be given any chance of reinvestment for a revival. But it became a dreadful situation for the GRA in the mid-1970's when a worldwide oil-based recession triggered a property-price crash that left the GRA committed to paying back hefty debts on the tracks it had snapped up (including Wimbledon) but which now weren't worth anywhere near enough to justify having undertaken those debts in the first place. The eventual closure in 1984 for the sale & redevelopment of the traditional home of the Greyhound Derby, White City (a stone's throw from QPR's Loftus Road and the recently-closed BBC TV-Centre) was the biggest aspect of the GRA's battle to stay afloat amid this particular financial crisis ... that's why the Greyhound Derby's been at Wimbledon from 1985 onwards because that sport's major races each belong to their respective track promoters rather than being scheduled/staged collectively by a governing body so it was only the GRA who had any say in re-locating the Derby to another of their tracks (and why Clive Feltham's quote that the GRA would allow anyone else staging greyhound racing at Wimbledon to host the Derby is a truly landmark quote that might not be so obvious to speedway folk). The GRA as a stand-alone company was swallowed up financially by Wembley Stadium in the late 1980's at a time when greyhound racing still took place a couple of times a week around the old "Twin Towers" football pitch but also a time when Wembley's own future was under huge debate linked in with any more-Midlands-based new National Football Stadium or an Olympic bid from any of London, Birmingham or Manchester. It was decided to retain the GRA as a brand-name for the dog tracks but the parent company was named Wembley plc and it's that company which Risk Capital Partners (fronted by entrepreneur Luke Johnson) bought around a decade ago although by that stage, Wembley plc had long since lost any grip it had on the building of the new arch-dominated Wembley Stadium so effectively Risk Capital were buying the GRA. Clive Feltham (as either a key figure at Wimbledon or as the GRA's Managing Director) is a constant figure going back to the Wembley plc days and is very much the ultimate "toe the party line" man even if doing so has sometimes made himself look clueless or ridiculous. The GRA has always appeared to be the only sports-dominated activity within Risk Captial's general portfolio of either retail/service-based industries or redevelopment ventures ... put the GRA's own 1960's/70's redevelopment strategy in with the latter of those Risk Capital themes and it's easy to understand why greyhound fans have been sceptical about Risk Capital all along. The first murky aspect of this is whether Galliard Homes's involvement with the GRA, especially at Wimbledon, dates back to them being linked directly to the GRA's own property strategy half a century ago or to them being good friends with Risk Capital. Secondly, although the exact figures (either the initial amount or the current position) have never come to light, it's clear (as myself and others have already explained in detail on this thread) that Irish banks propped up Risk/Galliard's involvement with multi-million-pound loans a few years before the 2008 worldwide financial crash dumped even more havoc on the Irish banks that it did upon their British counterparts ... that's where Nama join in this saga as Ireland's National Asset Management Agency representing those Irish banks who are still searching for the least-bad way of getting back some of those millions they've loaned to Risk/Galliard. Ultimately, it looks as if the GRA are now helplessly caught up in a 21st-century property speculation saga that's eerily similar to their own good-looking but ill-fated strategy in the 1960's/70's !! Thanks for reading through all of that background info which I hope makes it easier to understand the current circumstances which, in my view, can be summed up as follows ... The GRA, led by Clive Feltham, still run the day-to-day operations at their 4 remaining stadiums at Wimbledon, Belle Vue and the Birmingham pair of Perry Barr and Hall Green ... however, with the exception of their historic tradition of staging the Derby and several other big races, they've fallen way behind other groups in greyhound racing (where 2 main angles now dominate - either the bookie-owned tracks at Hove, Romford, Crayford, Monmore, Newcastle and Sunderland or the few other venues who've seriously invested in their spectator facilities like Sheffield, Nottingham and Peterborough) ... while the GRA tracks are making a day-to-day profit, it's at best keeping up with the interest demands from the Irish banks and certainly not making a fast-enough dent in the Irish loans. Galliard appear to have become the dominant player between themselves and Risk Capital in terms of who officially owns the GRA dog tracks (that's full ownership of Wimbledon, Belle Vue and Hall Green plus the operating rights at Perry Barr in an overall partnership with Birmingham City Council) ... hence why Clive Feltham's still referring to Galliard as being the owners of Wimbledon Stadium although his latest quotes about the GRA having a 3-year-lease to run Wimbledon have raised eyebrows because it was reported a few months ago that it was a 5-year-lease at Wimbledon alongside 15-year-leases at each of the other tracks. But the biggest shadow over all of this is the clearly-increasing pressure from Nama for Risk/Gslliard to speed-up repaying the Irish banks ... that's why the Racing Post have regarded Nama as the effective owners of Wimbledon Stadium for several months because Galliard have seemed to be taking some fairly desperate measures lately to stump up some immediate money from their involvement with the GRA. There was their vague and unsuccessful attempt in the autumn to individually sell-off Belle Vue or Hall Green ... and then their spectacularly-failed attempt to get planning permission for housing at Oxford Stadium which they're going to appeal against despite an Oxford councillor confirming that application was thrown out on 8 counts when just 2-or-3 such failings would usually render any appeal hopeless. As I see it, we're at a stalemate where Galliard are the nearest thing to the official private owners of Wimbledon Stadium and therefore can carry on the existing use of the site without Merton Council having any say because it's the continuation of a private business. Probably because they can't afford any outlay, Galliard don't want to put any further investment into that existing use but they're under increasing pressure from Nama to do some sort of development at that site because letting the existing business drift along is no good to Nama even if it continues to buy time for Galliard as well as being their cheapest option. At the moment, despite their on-going frustrations with Galliard's struggle to repay the multi-millions, Nama still appear to prefer to align themselves with any Galliard plan rather than expecting a better solution to emerge from elsewhere. Greyhound fans/entrepreneurs, football fans, speedway fans, existing local residents, potential new local residents, Merton Council and the Mayor of London (and his colleagues) can all put forward what they'd like to happen ... but ultimately, none of those can really make progress until Galliard and Nama make progress just between themselves on where they stand over the multi-millions still owed regarding the existing use of Wimbledon Stadium ... and all hell breaks loose if Nama decide to turn on Galliard, especially if Nama align themselves instead with any of the various interested parties I've just mentioned. Any further questions, salty ? !!

Every autumn, once the next year's FIM calendar is published, every club in the Elite & Premier League is invited as part of the fixture-scheduling process to request any dates it wants to avoid in the new season's fixtures to avoid FIM-clashes bearing in mind any riders it has already signed-up or the rest of its team-building plans. Such requests can be either to completely avoid any meeting being scheduled on that club's usual home night to clash with an awkward FIM-date or asking not to be given an away meeting on a particularly awkward day for that team's FIM-expectations. Clubs can make other scheduling requests, most notably heading into 2014 to avoid clashing with England's group games and possible last-16 matches in the football World Cup once they'd seen the draw made in Brazil just over a month ago. Some clubs are very good at scanning the FIM-calendar and then making a few sensible requests ... other clubs are usually only very good at moaning when their own fixture-list comes out full of clashes they hadn't bothered to request avoiding when they had the chance ... one club only began complaining about clashing with an England World Cup game in 2010 just a few weeks before the actual clash but several months after that particular World Cup draw !! But I suspect King's Lynn and Newcastle will be jointly frustrated that they've both been given away fixtures on the same night on two separate occasions when they must have requested careful joint-scheduling to cope with both Lewis Kerr and Lewis Rose being included in both sides' signings very early in the team-building process (a fair request just for all their away trips given their respective home fixtures aren't a problem as no Premier League side races on Wednesdays and no Elite League side races on Sundays). Admittedly, King's Lynn's 27th June trip to Coventry is listed by the Stars as "to be confirmed" while Newcastle go to Scunthorpe the same night ... but on 18th April, both Birmingham v King's Lynn and Scunthorpe v Newcastle appear to be rock-solid fixtures to cash in on the Good Friday bank holiday.

It might be hard to believe to the British members of this forum but, as far as I'm aware, Motorcycling Australia regard speedway with even less enthusiasm (compared to road/circuit racing) than seems to be the case with the Auto Cycle Union's almost non-existent attitude to British speedway ... hence why I included someone like Mark Lemon as an Australian speedway figurehead in my earlier post rather than including Motorcycling Australia.

While I can understand it needing to be the clubs themselves that sponsor the individual visa applications, I'm still surprised there doesn't seem to be much evidence of any collective advice from either the BSPA or someone at the Australian end of things like their World Cup manager Mark Lemon. It seems to be left almost entirely to the individual Australians to sort out everything within their visa applications except getting the covering sponsorship note from a club they're due to ride for ... at that point, it clearly becomes a huge advantage for any younger Aussies to have an older rider mentoring them as they're then more likely to be warned about sorting out their visa application in good time. But if there was someone either at the BSPA or like Lemo who was well-advertised as able to give general advice on these visa applications, I'm sure it would save quite a few of the hassles rumbling around at the moment ... what's more, once such collective help gets properly established, it soon becomes easier for new problems to be solved quicker by adapting the experience of dealing with similar previous cases. In the meantime, I can't help wondering if some of the current hassles could have been avoided with a better supply of up-to-date information to the Australian riders midway through last season.

The Racing Post's greyhound section, probably correctly in terms of its regular readership, has long since regarded the future of Wimbledon Stadium, wrapped up in the soap opera of Galliard, Nama and the We Want Wimbledon campaign, to be its biggest behind-the-scenes story by a wide margin and therefore covers any new developments in the story assuming its readers are well clued up about the key people/groups. Jim Cremin's article in today's paper may well have been hastily written before last night's print deadline depending on when the Nama letter and Diane McLean's reaction came to light yesterday ... while I can understand your criticism of the way the article's written when you've only seen the article itself, the actual presentation on page 83 of today's paper makes it very clear the story's about Wimbledon with a correctly-captioned picture of the track at the top, the headline mentioning WWW, Nama & Galliard in the middle and then Jim Cremin's article underneath.

Because Nama are acting on behalf of various Irish banks still owned millions from the current use of the site !! As I've mentioned before on this thread (especially posts 149 & 163 back in August/September) when explaining mostly-greyhound-based stories about the future of Wimbledon Stadium, the original purchase of the Greyhound Racing Association by Risk Capital over a decade ago (with Galliard Homes lurking in the background from an early stage, if not day one) was significantly funded by multi-million-pound loans from Irish banks who were still several years away from suffering an even bigger 2008 crash than their British counterparts. Within the GRA tracks, the property/redevelopment value of the Wimbledon site is much greater than Hall Green or Belle Vue (or the currently-closed Oxford) ... they can't sell the Perry Barr site as that's tied up in a special deal they have with Birmingham City Council so the only redevelopment money they've raised in recent years is a relatively small amount from the closure of what was always their scrubbiest remaining track at Portsmouth (there was also the closure of Catford in November 2003 but the GRA sold that to English Partnerships in 2004 before a 9-year stalemate that didn't result in the go-ahead for a housing estate until last May). As has also been mentioned earlier in this thread, Nama were behind the invitation a couple of months ago for any individual bids for either Hall Green or Belle Vue although nothing seemed to emerge from what always appeared a rather optimistic invite. That 2008 crash, along with Risk/Galliard's failure to make any proper progress in repaying those loans, has led to those Irish banks having to rely on Nama's clout as their only realistic short/medium-term way of getting the bulk of their money back ... it's long been clear that any profit Wimbledon greyhounds make from their well-attended meetings every Friday and Saturday night is really only covering the interest-payments on those loans rather than making a worthwhile dent in repaying them (the same applies to any profits from the other GRA tracks). With no new development at Wimbledon yet underway, the dragging out of the present scenario (with the real home straight facilities mothballed and the original back straight now the only side open to the public and therefore being the current home straight) has effectively led to Nama being regarded as the owner of the Wimbledon Stadium site (and it's been acknowledged as such by Risk/Galliard in several Racing Post reports in recent months). That's why Nama have an almighty say in what happens next because nothing can happen to the site (football stadium, new dog track, luxury flats or any other type of development) until they can assure those Irish banks that the redeveloper will cover enough of Risk/Galliard's existing multi-million-pound debt. Merton Council have made it clear they prefer a sports/leisure-based development of the site but their influence (especially regarding planning rules & consent) really doesn't come into play until the current private owners want to go ahead with any redevelopment ... and that redevlopment can't go ahead until either Nama report back successfully to those Irish banks or, even worse, Nama and those Irish banks come to the reluctant conclusion of settling for just the small proceeds they'd get from some sort of bankruptcy action against the GRA & Risk/Galliard (such a draconian outcome could be disastrous for the Belle Vue Aces if it was to happen before the building of the long-awaited National Speedway Stadium). By the looks of this latest article, Nama feel their best (or more probably, least bad) option is to support the redevelopment plan of a company they're already dealing with rather than rely on being better satisfied by any new incoming developer. Diane McLean speaks passionately on behalf of those wanting to keep greyhounds running at Wimbledon but beyond being the leader of a noisy campaign, she has no clout whatsoever compared to Risk/Galliard, Merton Council or Nama. Perhaps very significantly a few weeks ago, both she and Paschal Taggart were the invited guests of honour at the Greyhound Writers' Association annual Christmas lunch, after which Mr Taggart was quoted as admitting it's "Wimbledon or nothing" for his ambitions of bringing his Irish experience of revamping greyhound racing to this country ... the overwhelming impression was that his enthusiasm for Wimbledon is beginning to slide and if that's the case, there's almost no hope of the dogs beating a football/housing redevelopment on that site because his reputation, determination and contacts are crucial to the whole greyhound project.