Grachan

It wasn't the sprint race that cost Kurtz the title. It was having a poor round in Prague.

I'm sure I could fathom it out if I bothered to look into it. I just haven't. Presumably it's always been like that anyway with regards to semi final qualification etc., even going back to the A, B, C, D final. For example, today Doyle and Michelsen both scored 10, but in that old system one would have been in the A final and one would have been in the B final. For me, I was never that keen on the race points counting as GP points. I felt it made the final less interesting.

Lindgren didn't get an "extra point". He finished 11th. The rider who finishes 11th gets 6 points. You get points for the position you finished in the meeting. It's not hard. If a football team wins 6-0 do they get 6 points? No. they get 3. If a tennis player wins 6-2, 4-6, 6-4 do they win 16-12? No. they win 2-1. Scoring systems are what they are and that is what you ride/play to. Personally, I like the A, B, C, D final that they used to have. But at least this way the winner of the final gets the most points - which didn't always happen when it was based on race points. With regards to countback, I've no idea how it works. I'm assuming Lindgren finished above Kvech because he beat him when they raced? Is that correct? Or is it because he had a race win? However it is worked out, Lindgren finished the meeting ahead of Kvech so gets the points for that position. Easy peasy.

I don't agree actually. The last 3 races are like the championship rounds in boxing. They sort the men from the boys. Fricke constantly looks like one of the fastest riders on show but can't do it in the big ones.

For me, speedway's real decline began when they introduced such things at double point Tactical rides and 39 point points limits. I'm not sure when that was now. Maybe around 2000-ish? These, for me, caused a big reaction, and I remember going the following season and being surprised at how much crowds had gone down as a result. I don't think the sport ever really recovered from these "adjustments". The big irony with these, if course, is that it was Ipswich (the team that everyone now sees as the powerhouse strong side) that were very influential in such things being brought in because they were struggling with weak sides. Nowadays I struggle to get through a meeting on the TV. I'm sure that losing my team (Swindon) has a part to play in this, but I really do look at the sport on a Monday night and wonder why it is so boring. Is it just my own interest dropping off, or has it genuinely become that? I grew up loving speedway, and going to Swindon, Oxford and Reading where huge crowds would bait each other and the atmosphere would thrive on it. I guess I blinked and the World changed.

Why blame the fact that she is female for a decision like that? Do you think that every female watching that thought that Thomsen was at fault?

Bewley is so frustrating. If he could find consistency he could really challenge for the title - but I guess everyone already knows that.

A lot of empty seats.

To be fair, it's actually not easy to only show 2 riders when they are racing 3 abreast.

Yes. I was thinking the same thing. How many times have they cut to show a single rider when there's a good race going on that you're trying to follow?

I agree, which is part of the frustration of it all.

Plus Poland, Chechia, Latvia. Go Egon!

Is he though? How can you really tell when there is nobody else who seems capable of properly challenging him and genuinely putting him under pressure? Nobody else has the consistency. World number 2 Robert Lambert, for example, ended up with 3 points last night. If you look through history, the great champions always had someone pushing them. Funding, Briggs, Olsen and Mauger all had each other. Nielsen and Gundersen had each other. Rickardsson had Pedersen, Crump, Hancock, Adams etc. Since Zmarzlik started winning World Championships, the one rider to properly challenge him was Artem Laguta - and Laguta won and was promptly removed from the series. Zmarzlik's most consistent challenger is probably Lindgren, who is not really a genuine rival. Someone needs to step up to the plate to make this interesting. Can Kurtz do that? I'm not convinced. Holder maybe? It's a shame Bartosz can't be transported into another era so we could really see how good he is. To be honest, if you could do that and transport someone like Egon Muller into the modern series, my guess is you'd see Muller winning multiple World Championships and being hailed as a contender for the greatest of all time.

Interesting to see a Wales v England women's 6 Nations rugby match on tv at the moment. The crowd looks a lot smaller than for the speedway gps, yet it is on at the Millenium Stadium and shown on Prime time BBC.

That's a shame. It was a very good website, and one I often looked at to find average etc.