RobMcCaffery

If I were a senior producer at Eurosport I'd be looking very carefully at the contract after last night. Note how few league matches there are on Sky this year? A lot of damage has been done but it might take a while to see the effect due to contracts.

Oh congratulations, I write a lengthy piece from the heart trying to help the sport I love and you find one minor point to pick on. Congratulations, you win the cardboard medal! Typical speedway forum. You claim to be interested in debates and free speech but all you want to do is score cheap points, which is why most people don't bother now and just leave your type to childishly bicker away. There's plenty would disagree with you about most of those sports. Perhaps you don't understand them? People take WWF as an entertainment - like an American pantomime. So, any other points you want to discuss? Do you want them explaining? Do you want to know how to trim a post you're responding to rather than rely on large coloured fonts? You claim to be a fan of speedway but in reality your posts show you just want an argument. Anyway, sadly there's plenty who will play with you. I'm not one. Pathetic as ever.

I do suspect that tonight will be a very significant turning-point for the sport at international level. To me, the sport's been trying to over-reach itself for many years, based on the ability to pull off meetings at Cardiff, although that's been a very close-run thing on a few occasions. Trying to take the sport to a new stature and level of public awareness are of course noble ambitions but I do wonder if the sport simply has the resources to pull off these grandiose schemes often enough? Is this a brown ale sport pretending it drinks champagne? (No Darcy Ward jokes please - there's a separate thread for that). Just how far can speedway reach? Is it wiser to play it safe, run meetings on tracks that can allow a decent product to be offered to the world or do we keep aiming too high and falling on our noses? Yes, it does work sometimes but you cannot build a sport on just atmosphere and hype. You can fool some of the people etc. etc. What we saw tonight was simply deplorable. It was like seeing a former love in the gutter, begging for fags or another drink. Jim Lawrence was not in control. The failure to exclude Troy Batchelor was questionable but the inability to either see the problem with the starting gate or why riders were pulling-up, or simply to choose to plough on regardless was simply unacceptable. The Grand Prix tries to provide us with the best riders, the best stadia and best racing. Is Jim Lawrence one of the best referees? If so, we need an urgent training programme! His on-screen body language during the early problems was worrying. It did not look like someone in control, and I've been in the company of enough referees over the years to have a clue about this. Regarding the role of the Race Director, Phil Morris faced three crises in his first meeting - practice, starting gate and then the track break-up. The fact that the meeting failed after 12 heats shows that it was not a happy start. But his predecessor in the role Tony Olsson was clearly there, as seen on TV and I presume that his predecessor Ole Olsen was also present, given that he was in charge of the track installation. Surely either or both were on hand to advise? Just how many times will we suffer these fiascos and just how many more times will we hear that lessons have been learnt and that the problem can't happen again? It has. It has many times. It's been happening for years, even back at Wembley, such as 1975. Speedway cocks up, eventually. Gelsenkirchen, Riga, Ullevi. The list goes on. I am certain that BSI's rivals One Sport will be delighted to see them fail so spectacularly in the most prominent stadium in Poland. Is this a turning-point in speedway politics that sees Poland trying to take control of the sport it already financially owns? (Ask any rider fined by a Polish club for getting injured riding for a team outside the country, or at least threatened regarding that latter point) It's time for the sport at ALL levels to live within its means, to stop thinking that a few flashy risks will bring riches. They won't. Solid development will, putting good value for money meetings on at sustainable venues. Let people grow to love an all-action sport rather than use smoke and mirrors to convince people that crap is gold-plated. It's time to focus on the product, the racing, not the wrapping. Then, once the product is strong enough, organisationally and financially then take it to those higher levels. We can see some great racing at GPs. Not enough though. Any fool can reach for the stars and fall. To get there you have to do more than reach, you have to build on solid foundations. In Britain, in a week of generally fine spring weather we have staged how many meetings at out highest level? Two. Just two. This is to accommodate tonight's hubris in Poland. That's a high price to pay and once again the British public have been mugged as much as those fools who think that flying to Poland's going to automatically give them great speedway. Still, the atmosphere was great I suppose and the beer was cheap., Who needs more? So far this year for various reasons, notably health I've no been able to get to any live speedway. Fortunately that's changing and I can hopefully start getting to some league matches, ideally in the PL or NL. I'll leave the rest of you to be dazzled by the shiny shiny....... Speedway cannot afford to self-destruct like this yet again. Sadly it will. It mustn't. (P.S. - "So, this time in English please Tomasz.....")

I think the only way to save the situation is to get the start tarts to start a burlesque show.......... Plenty of Polish tracks free tomorrow with there being no league schedule.

One Sport.

I can't see this continuing. Despite all the hype about shoehorning speedway into spectacular stadia but downright unsuitable tracks this just is not acceptable and is sadly a continuation of a trend seen in Gelsenkirchen, Riga and (nearly) Cardiff. If this were at Bydgoscz we'd all be proud of our sport, watching a thrilling advert for speedway.It's not. The stadium's pretty but that's no good if you destroy the sport's reputation in the process. I waited six, months for this? I felt the same about the first Sky meeting. Much as it pains me to say, the Eurosport Best Pairs meetings were both far better. Perhaps it is time to hand over to One Sport and let Poland run the sport that they already own?

One Sport will be loving this, and on their own turf. The referee and race director need to take control now! No excuses.

It's also available on TVP's own official site. Since TVP isn't a premium sports channel like nsport it can carry an official free stream like Kanal Sport did in Denmark for their league: http://sport.tvp.pl/19526334/zuzel-i-liga-zks-row-rybnik-wanda-instal-krakow I believe they also keep these available as video on demand which could be useful for those with busy Sundays.

Google Chrome/Google Translate to the rescue: Sales Period: Starts Wednesday, 15-03-18 10:00 Ends Saturday, 15-08-15 23:00 Stands380.00 SEK (Incl. 30.00 SEK fees) Standing room120.00-275.00 USD (Incl. 20.00-25.00 SEK fees) You just click on how many tickets you want of each class.

BBC Radio WM is not a commercial radio station, however, but a public service broadcaster, like all of the domestic BBC services. It has no need or reason to 'fill up air time' since all midweek sports content is in addition to the normal service between 7 and 10 pm on weekdays which is to broadcast the networked Mark Forrest show, a service imposed on all BBC Local Radio stations by the necessary cuts to BBC broadcasting caused by the freezing of the licence fee. Any sport coverage has to be argued for within the BBC with a strong justification why they Forrest show should be replaced. So, BBC WM is not involved in speedway for any form of commercial gain. It is not looking for material to fill the gaps between adverts. It clearly chooses to cover speedway on the basis that it is part of their public service remit to the West Midlands. Speedway should be delighted that the BBC shows such interest locally since our sport takes its place as a major sport in the area, not the ignored minority status given elsewhere. Our sport receives prime coverage by BBC WM, secondly only to football. Lord knows why! And faced with this publicity windfall what does speedway do? It bans them from covering Birmingham meetings last year and they get turfed out of King's Lynn over petty broadcast fees. This at a time when many minor sports pay to be broadcast! Speedway's chronic lack of vision is exemplified by this behaviour. It can only see the short-term financial gain and can't see it needs to invest in publicity in order to prosper. Sometimes this investment is in care and consideration, not monetary. On the whole it refuses to advertise in local press or commercial radio yet still expects free publicity. Too often its journalists are regarded as 'freeloaders' and met with suspicion. It is clear that is not the case in some enlightened examples and they in turn get excellent coverage in their local media. Speedway needs all the help it can get and perhaps one small step forwards is to recognise that you can't monetise all coverage. Petty fees for short term gain are acting as a strait-jacket on the sport, but then given the squalid state of it these days perhaps its best if journalists and the wider public don't look too carefully. Speedway should be embracing BBC WM's interest, not viewing it as a threat to suck money out of.

And they do it so very well with such cutting effect. Ah well,, shows what you get when you try to help idiots.

As I pointed out in post 11: "The Warsaw GP is in the British Eurosport 2 schedule for Saturday 18th April at 18.00. "

The Warsaw GP is in the British Eurosport 2 schedule for Saturday 18th April at 18.00.

I recently bought a digital copy of the Auckland-based New Zealand Herald and was pleasantly surprised to find a Speedway article on Hayden Sims. Good to see the sport does get coverage in NZ still. Article's also on their website: http://www.nzherald.co.nz/sport/news/article.cfm?c_id=4&objectid=11384426

Enough is enough. You clearly favour the idiots. Please delete my account with immediate effect. Life's too short to battle with the foolish and malicious. Will the last sane person in the BSF kindly switch out the lights?

Thank you for letting me know. I had no idea. Trevor O'Brien was one of those characters that the sport needs so badly, a trier, fighter (literally) and one who got the fans behind him as they willed his career forward. One of the terrible side aspects of the closure of Rye House in 1994 was that we'd be denied seeing his career finally flourish, Do we know what happened? (EDIT) - I see it was a motocross accident. Thanks for some valued, happy memories of a difficult time, Trevor and enjoy your rest.

He just couldn't consistently go great guns, fire himself to the front and create super speedway. 1990 - Trevor O'Brien. Well, I liked him..... Depends on your criteria I guess. Most fun I'd had since the legendary Pete Wigley. As for 1994, was there a speedway season?

Yes, but this time we MUST ensure that the amalgamation is at Premier League level and that the clubs in that competition do not suffer as a result, unlike the BL/NL merger of the early 90s when the NL clubs were royally shafted. Sadly promotions like Poole's will never, ever allow this solution to happen.

Looks like Pedersen thinks he's riding against Poole. Things to do, will watch the main matches on You Tube in the week, assuming r&r will be able to offer his usual excellent service of links. I shall leave you in peace and the Gniezno manager some time to work out what to say to his shower. Thanks for the company.

I've got the TVP stream - superb picture quality - pity about what's on the pictures.

If 'Carbon's an energy drink I could see them wanting a refund. They're coal merchants. It's a bad match when you end up researching the sponsors.

Looks like they've already given up on Rybnik for some odd reason.

The centre green at Powderhall, Edinburgh was always a joy to see - perfectly trimmed, flower borders and proper check mowing pattern. I noticed on leaving one meeting that the Monster Trucks were due there the next week....... You had to watch where you walked at Rye House - I don't think the greyhound trainers had heard of pooper scoopers. There was also a rather boggy section that might have muffled the presentation as I sank into it.

I can see Lewis Bridger spending many more nights on departure lounge floors now he's finally hit on the right preparation.

Think someone needs to tell Gniezno it's stopped raining. Interesting that it's now level on aggregate for the bonus point!