moxey63

As I am currently going through the 1984 magazines for a bit of research, the topic of tracks banning the Star was happening 30 years ago. In one edition, the Star reported an incident at Eastbourne , in which Belle Vue's Larry Ross complained that some of the Eagles' fans had verbally abused him. The story didn't impress Eagles' promoter, Bob Dugard... and he was raging that the Star didn't do the same at Wimbledon, with reports of visiting riders also being treated similarly there. Dugard immediately reacted... by banning sales of the Star at his track!

Like the great Gerry Rafferty song... I'd "Get It Right Next Time" and listen to what her indoors says!

s Phil Check my figures... Was meant to be funny, not a dig at you.

56%? Yeah, right... You are dealing with an A-Grade mathematician, Philip, sir... and someone you scoffed at, when I said I'd do a better job than Bryan Seery. Explain where the other 49% goes?

I cannot understand why posts are slating the Star and its cover price - as a lot of today's programmes are almost as much... and you have to fill them in yourself. Give me the Star anyday to an over-priced match day mag, which really is robbing the public in dimly lit stadiums. As for not wanting to upset promoters who may ban its sale if the Star printed anything to upset, just think of perhaps the extra readers it would get... for having a more honest debate than the one that may... just may... be pandering to track bosses. If the Star is, and I'm not saying it is, afraid to print exactly what is happening in the corridors of power within British speedway, surely this could be the reason the sport has gone down quicker than my Friday-night takeaway. As the Star relies on the sport to keep it going, surely they must protect their product... and begin reporting incidents that effect the sport, its sales, reader dissatisfaction and the promoters that aren't really putting in a shift.

PM sent

Referring back to Bryan Seery, whose little bits of trivia each week, the nine-point averages that were hard to get in (for any rider), oddments in the winter reviews etc... I still get goosies when I see a Seery's Statistics page... and an Angus Kix one (for different reasons) for that matter. Perhaps Speedway Star could give us back our grids of every scorer in the winter reviews - in the format of the initial Daily Mirror books rather than riders reading across, if you know what I mean. It would make my winter, that would, Mr Rising.. it certainly would.

Agree with tigerowl, as I also buy the mag for keeping. In fact, I never hardly read it, but know it's part of research matter, when I need it. In fact, was disappointed the winter editions only included averages and not match-by-match scorers. My favourite parts of the Star, I suppose, are the bits and pieces, the pages that bring the unusual snippets. Results and scores are important, for future generations and historians (and stat nerds). I hope the Star returns to providing all the scorers in the winter track reviews. Still not had the time to print out last years, which are online, but hopefully will get chance before they disappear.

What does Golden DOubles mean then?

Would you be so kind, my friend, and direct me to this online page.

That, if it hasn't been raised, was the 1977 World Best Pairs... a meeting I would love to have on tape (now DVD, of course). In all my years of collecting, I haven't come across footage.

Oh dear... So Phil Taylor could become World Speedway's next sensation , as long as he had the fastest bike? Pure skill? Oh dear... I thought it was about the amount of girth you had around the old waistband. Although I have to admit, that my bedroom wall has more holes in it than the dart board I was aiming at... and skill is indeed a factor in darts... I cannot agree, that the best riders simply rely on the fastest bikes. Of course, their rise has seen them acquire the fastest bikes, but Boris Johnson, for example, I wouldn't trust him near a speedway bike... but I bet he can play darts.

Darts is like blow football, push penny... the sort of things you once witnessed on that ITV programme in 1970s Britain, was it Indoor League? It is skillfull but not a sport. The only reason it is popular with some, is because i's usually staged in public houses etc and the audience are usually sloshed and would not otherwise attend, but for the reason of beer supping.

Darts is as much a sport as pricking spuds with sharp object to make jackets. ONE HUNDRED AND EIGHTY!!!!! Darts is the fat guys equivalent to the X-Factor or Strictly Come Dancing. It's all about the WOW factor, the audience that pi**ed, they don't even know why they are there... or indeed where they are. Sometimes they mistakingly appear at the eviction night of the BIG BROTHER shows, a rent-a-crowd which, sadly, speedway cannot afford to even rent.

I was listening to the radio the other day, about the £8 minimum wage, how some businesses were saying, they wouldn't be able to afford it if brought in and would either have to close or lay-off some staff. The show host (it was LBC and James O'Brien) questioned this attitude, asking if it was actually such a worthwhile business... if it couldn't afford to pay its staff this amount (which would be introduced in five years' time). He was sort of right. Similarly with speedway. If a track can't afford to run in its current shape, it has to make changes or even pull down the shutters. It sounds simplistic, but how can a promoter say he's doing his job to the best of his ability or doing the sport any favours, simply by bailing out the track every year. Surely, by accepting they'll lose cash every year, speedway bosses don't appear that high up on the business side of the sport. It does raise the question... whether their attitude at attempting to keep the sport going at their base despite losing money year in and out, is whether they have done the sport more good than bad. Alright, so many a track has been saved from folding, but the attitude of injecting cash into floundering clubs has only hidden the need for them to sort out the problem. When a promoter says they have lost £100,00 in a season, surely they should have to answer to somebody independent, who has the interest of the sport at heart. Speedway cannot keep on the way it is. Not enough fans, admission being raised every year and fans dwindling. Something has to give in the end. But have we any promoters... with the business head to lead the sport out of the doldrums? If they are prepared to lose so much of their money, just to give an ever-dwindling fanbase somewhere to go once a week, I question it.

Thirty years ago... a long time... but some things never change in speedway. Back at 1984 Eastbourne, and this sounds oh so familiar, they again they were bemoaning low crowds and losing money. The club said, their gates were just 1200 - 600 lower than they needed to be to break even! The Sussex strugglers were also rocked with a 300(?) loss on the average gate.. they felt, just by the mid-season retirement of number one rider Paul Woods, whose absence lasted a few weeks, after which those hundreds never returned.

Live speedway can often be torture. Whether actually at the track or watching at home, today's dash-dash society isn't speedway's best friend. People notice the gaps between races more than ever and attention spans are getting short. Recorded matches are more appealing, or just record the live match on your SKY+ and fast forward the boring parts. I do... and I'm usually done within minutes!

No.. not blaming Eurosport entirely, but they are a bit amateurish. Any other broadcaster worth its salt, they would surely repeat the match and have made sure that the remaining heats were included. Had for example, SKY left a match hanging in the balance like this - whether or not people had paid via subscription (as I do) or piggy-backing, like a lot of so-called fans, for free off the internet - they would have been slaughtered. I have heard the groans etc in the past, just when SKY have finished before the rostrum places were paraded at a GP.. or speedway has overrun, and SKY, not their fault, have had to switch the remainder to another channel because something that is scheduled begins. Least with SKY and all its many hours its given the sport, they do repeat speedway a lot... even editing on the many many occasion that speedway overruns and lasts longer than the kids' six-weeks' holidays. Eurosport have always been a bit hap-hazard in its speedway coverage. Even a few weeks ago, and it may not have been their fault initially, they lost contact at a Swedish Match through a technical fault but never repeated it, with missing heats included, at a later date. SKY would have done.

You really can never be sure of what you get with Eurosport. The schedules are unreliable, then they either come on late or run out of time or run over. They then run badly edited replays without all the heats (how spoiled speedway fans have become since SKY, which everyone is quick to criticise).

My all-time fave is Paul Tyrer, ex-Belle Vue, then Peter Collins... lots of riders I like, not all with Belle Vue links either. I find the likes of Garry Middleton, Kenny Carter, Steve Gresham, characters etc, really interesting... and the riding styles of Carl Glover, Richard Hellsen and many more, really eye-catching. To be honest, the bread-and-butter riders make my list more than any superstars on it... But I'd rather read the life story of a rider who struggled to make it in the sport rather than, say, someone like Jason Crump, who I admire.

Belle Vue's Hyde Road provided the venue, track and, more often than not, the riders that regularly paraded their overtaking skills on the 418 yard oval. You couldn't have imagined Craven, Collins, Morton etc being given as much licence anywhere else to display their lack of gating awareness, but energy for prolific overtaking. Even now, three decades on, Kirky Lane has never replaced it, although you do sometimes get decent racing there. Hyde Road and its rickety old stands remain in ones memory, as do the flash back images of the past - Wilkie and that innocent-looking spill, PC and that grid in '77, Lohmann's life-threatening injuries of 1980... One season - 1984 - was one summer that sticks out, with both track and Aces' line-up filling many a Saturday night with regular thrashings of all visitors, which would normally become tiresome. But the side Stuart Bamforth assembled, mostly poor gaters that utilised the vast open spaces to their advantage, merely added to the occasion. Rarely did any side come away from Hyde Road without bruised egos and slow-looking motors. There was that 64-14 win against Eastbourne, for instance, a possible maximum scoreline over the 13 heats halted only when Kenny McKinna switched bikes for one race, and it wasn't fast enough to falter Eagles' Colin Richardson and his side's only second place all night! Huge wins were mainly secured with plenty of overtaking by the home boys, even against the weakest teams. It was thrilling speedway. It was a feel-good campaign. But let's give the current track its due. We must remember, not alll memories of Kirky Lane are bad ones. The track has given us speedway, which is easy to forget, the last quarter of a century, and it is sometimes too easy for many to belittle the place. It was never going to stand up side-by-side with what Hyde Road offered. But, when the bulldozers moved in at the zoo in November 1987, Kirky was the sport's lifeline. Sometimes it is easy to forget, at least it provided another club from disappearing.

I never really felt like Bradford was the ideal arena for domestic speedway. Odsal always appeared empty and soulless, even when there were a couple of thousand in it, and therefore I prefer small stadiums without vast gaps on the terraces. Apart from the initial matches, maybe, Belle Vue's new stadium will probably never average better than a third full for team matches, and that, I'm afraid, is being positive about the sport's ability to pull.

Yes, what has the sport done with all the lashings of SKY money? Imagine the depth of losses it would have accrued, if SKY hadn't been there. Bet you the Elite League would have been gone a long time ago, and promoters would have had to cut their cloth. There has never been an abundance of forward thinking in speedway, which is why most clubs rent their venues and run the business from a tin container. Some supporters do not like the true facts, when the perilous state of British speedway is the hot topic. They counter argue that, if we all stopped going, there'd be no speedway. Some use the names of tracks that have folded, merely as there reason for attending or against those that don't, as a conscience pricker. Promoters have for a long while used these fans, knowing they attend out of habit... and to help keep the speedway alive. Bosses would surely have seen the danger pit widening and, you'd like to think, would have addressed the problems a long time ago? Would they have tried to stop the rot? The SKY money perhaps gave them a cushion... a worry another day mentality. Like tracks that aren't worked on from one week to the next.. it's a mindset of "everything will be ok on the day." .

There is no simple way to resolve speedway's current plight... but there are ways. Everybody has different angles on them, but we, as fans, don't have the say to try to fix them. The promoters do. So when they bleat on about 500 fans turning up for a match and the club losing thousands upon thousands every season, don't feel sorry for them. If it was you losing money, you would do something about it. We as a sport, deserve the men that run it. What other person would be prepared to lose so much money, in the knowledge that they are simply throwing money away? A sound business man with some sense wouldn't do it. Perhaps there aren't enough sound businessmen within the sport - the ones that are, with an inkling of brains, they are running the most successful clubs.. and crowds are healthy. Be honest... are those in charge with bringing the sport to its current mess, ones we expect to pull it out of it? For starters, any individual that is prepared to throw money down the pan,as our promoters do, shouldn't be allowed to own a shed.. never mind a speedway club.

There would always be teams using empty spaces in their line-ups. In 1997, wasn't it six-man teams, and still some were operating five-man setups?