Rain, Sky, News & Tai

ITEM: I initially delayed this week’s blog so that I could write about the climax of the British speedway season, the Elite League play-off finals. With the semi-finals affected by rain, and the finals delayed by a week, Swindon held their leg of the final last Monday, and came away with a seven-point win (even if it should have been thirteen if it wasn’t for that ridiculous tactical ride rule!). Poole were due to host their leg of the final on Wednesday, only for that to fall victim to the weather, too. No problem, they said, we’ve covered the track and we’ll go ahead on Friday night. Only they didn’t, and they didn’t.

So, as I write, it’s scheduled for tonight, and two weeks after we should have crowned the champions of what has frankly been a bizarre and horrible season, we still don’t know who will go into the record books as Elite League winners 2012.

No man can legislate for the weather, of course, and it’s been a terrible summer for rain. You can’t help but wonder, though, whether the showpiece finale - one part of the season salivated over by Sky (and broadcast live on Radio 5 Live Xtra) – should be left to the whims of the staging promoters. This is absolutely the one part of the season that has to be run right, and on time. I’m not privy to discussions held by Elite League promoters, but I do wonder if more couldn’t have been done by them, as a unit, to ensure the final went ahead as planned.

As it is, we wait until tonight. Injuries have disrupted both teams but that’s speedway, and whoever wins will have done it on the track as much as in the boardroom and the promoter’s office. Roll on 2013, though, eh?

ITEM: News broke last week that the Sky TV deal to show the SGP series had expired. And also that there was only one year left on the current deal to show the Elite League. This came on the back of a gossip piece in several newspapers that, owing to the obscene amount they’d paid for Premier League football, the channel would have to make cuts elsewhere, and a couple of newspapers even specifically named speedway.

The reaction was mixed. Some view Sky as the great saviour of the sport, and others regard them as a disruptive influence. The truth, as always, is probably somewhere in between.

British speedway survived, even thrived, before the Sky deal. However, the cyclical nature of entertainment fortunes – and let’s be straight on this, speedway is entertainment, just like the cinema and bingo – means that you can’t get a clear picture of just how much Sky has affected the success (or otherwise) or the sport: If having a weekly outlet on a major satellite broadcaster coincided with an upswing in attendances, you couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t happening anyway, and vice versa.

One thing that is without doubt is that Sky has brought in some much-needed cash to the sport. Whether that has always gone to the right places, or been used as a crutch by promoters unwilling or unable to find that cash themselves, is another point of argument, but let’s pretend that it’s been a bonus, and has allowed the sport to develop beyond where it would ordinarily have been. Only we can’t, because all he evidence – team kevlars aside – points to the opposite, that despite the Sky cash the product has been steadily decreasing in quality, with constant tinkering of the rules, and petty point-scoring between promoters playing a huge part in that.

Sky does not need speedway, either SGP or Elite League. Audiences have been gradually decreasing for both (although interestingly, and given the high profile attached to the moribund series, the EL consistently outrates the grands prix), and the money spent could be better spent elsewhere, they could probably argue.

However, speedway is treated like something of a red-headed stepchild by the channel. There are few, if any, bulletins on the 24-hour, desperate for content, Sky Sports News channel, and the show is constantly shunted around the channel listings, sometimes relegated to the dreaded “red button”. While other sports receive magazine-style shows, dedicated to the 95% of action that doesn’t take place on live broadcasts, speedway misses out, despite the plethora of footage available from domestic providers (often in HD) and overseas TV.

And to those people who argue that the perceived poor quality of the Elite League means that it gets all it deserves from Sky, I would point in the direction of the British Basketball League, a twelve-team league devoid of international stars, yet somehow deserving of live games and a two-hour weekly highlights show.

So given Sky doesn’t need speedway, and acts like it a lot of the time (and that’s no slight on those who work very hard on the shows we do get), does speedway need Sky? Specifically, because although the Premier and National Leagues have their own issues, they get very little from the channel in the first place, does Elite League speedway need Sky?

It’s a no-brainer that the loss of the cash paid upfront each season would be a huge blow to some promoters. Also, and I’m no promoter so I couldn’t tell you exactly how it figures into discussions, I’d imagine that being shown three or four times a year on TV is a big bargaining tool for sponsors. Although, it must be said, being shown weekly hasn’t managed to attract a banner sponsor for the league or associated competitions…

But as far as bringing people in through the door? I’m not so sure. It certainly hasn’t helped get coverage in other media outlets - save for a few dedicated local radio channels, reporting on speedway in the national newspapers, and on the BBC and ITV, is woeful, almost criminally so. The disruption caused, and loss of attending fans, by running on a Monday night must also be unwelcome to most promoters, and the rumoured eagerness to race in “tricky” conditions must also be a worry to some riders.

So would the Elite League miss Sky? Certainly in the short term, and with an effect on the financial ability of some tracks to compete, but we have that anyway now. Yes, the product would have to be reduced further, but if carefully managed that could be a good thing.

I don’t want to see the back of speedway on Sky. I enjoy my Monday night fix, even if I do spend most of it moaning about what I’m watching on Twitter. I also want more, from both sides, out of the deal. I want the Elite League to provide a better product – closer racing and fairer team-building, with fewer riders clearly out of their depths, and no season-long gaps in teams plugged by R/R or constant guests. I want Sky to work out how a weekly, two-hour magazine show for speedway is as possible as it is for basketball, and I want regular – and enticing – news pieces on Sky Sports News. I want both to work together to create stars from the riders dedicated to riding for British clubs, rather than those who treat British speedway as a training track.

The benefits for both sides are obvious. For the Elite League enhanced coverage should increase their visibility with non-fans and sponsors, bringing more people and money into the sport so they are less dependant on Sky’s teat. For Sky better, closer racing, and the full story of a speedway season, is exciting and compelling TV, and probably inexpensive compared to other, more high-profile, sports. Let’s hope they can work together to achieve it.

ITEM: So, a week later than usual, BSI finally got around to naming their permanent wild cards for the 2013 Speedway Grand Prix series, and three of the names were greeted with no surprise at all. Jarek Hampel is a title-challenger who had his 2012 season ruined by injury, Martin Vaculik performed well as Hampel’s replacement and even won a grand prix, while Darcy Ward, whatever you may think of him off the track, is a prodigious talent. That just leaves Tai Woffinden, whose receipt of the final wild cards may explain why things took a week longer than usual.

Put simply, Woffinden does not deserve to ride in the series. That’s not a slight on him, although I find his public persona to be a little obnoxious, it’s just a fact. He’s been constantly outscored in Poland and Sweden* by other contenders for the slot, and has never even reached a Grand Prix Challenge Final. Only in the Elite League, where he now threatens to pull out of, has Woffinden ever approached anything like top-rider status.

No, Woffinden’s inclusion is political. It is because he, for the purposes of speedway, is British, and BSI (and possibly the FIM) seem to think this is important. True, TV ratings and attendances at the British Grand Prix are on the slide, despite Chris Harris’s best efforts to stay competitive at this level, so maybe they have a point. I’d argue otherwise, and a straw poll conducted on Twitter by Sky’s Nigel Pearson seemed to indicate as much.

Woffinden has been given a huge “gimme” and I hope he grasps it with both hands. He’s still a young man, with a lot of growing to do, and may yet represent this country – and himself – with ???. We’ll all be watching with interest, I’m sure.

* Those non-GP riders averaging more than Tai in both Sweden & Poland - Janusz Kołodziej, Grzegorz Walasek, Piotr Protasiewicz, Tomasz Jędrzejak, Patryk Dudek, Jason Crump, Daniel Nermark, Przemysław Pawlicki, Michael Jepsen Jensen, Krzysztof Buczkowski, Leon Madsen, Adrian Miedziński and Thomas H Jonasson.

ITEM: Speedway’s relationship with its fans, through the media, has always been very carefully stage-managed. Fans are told exactly what the promoters want them to know, and nothing more. Often that amounts to zero, for a number of reasons running from not wanting to look like dicks to trying to maximise crowd levels.

This worked very well back in the day, when the only access fans had to their clubs was though the official programme, a compliant speedway press, or pieces placed in the local and national media by the same journalists who wrote for the first two.

The world is an utterly different place now, however, moving at a breakneck speed, and speedway just hasn’t kept up with it. The internet has changed everything. Something can happen at a track and within seconds be in the public domain, with all the checks on accuracy you’d expect from such speed. Fans get half a story and it grows from there, with speedway clubs unable – or unwilling – to take ownership of it, with predictable results.

This was never more vividly illustrated than by the non-arrival of Darcy Ward and Troy Batchelor at Saturday night’s Elite League Riders’ Championship. Riders failing to turn up for the ELRC is nothing new. It used to be the jewel in the crown of British speedway, with a line-up often better than that year’s World Final (which had to include some pesky Poles and Russians) but in recent years it has fallen from favour, with some of the “stars” that deign to ride in the Elite League feeling it beneath them. So, at first glance, Ward and Batchelor not showing (with the former having a big match in Poland the day after, the latter having no-showed the event before, and both involved in a play-off final on the following Monday) seemed a simple case of riders treating fans with contempt.

However, and before too long, the story developed. That Ward was in hospital after being beaten up, with some even suggesting that Batchelor had been arrested for doing it! While the former proved correct, the latter was well wide of the mark, and poor old Troy just had a bad throat. With the news of their absences not reaching the fans until they entered the stadium, however, an opportunity had been lost – both men would have been ruled out of the contest much earlier in the day, and the chance for the BSPA – and Poole and Swindon – to take ownership of the story was clear.

For whatever reason, however, they chose not to, instead leaving it to conjecture and rumour – the shallow puddle where people like me play – to win the day. One may say we had no right to find out what had clearly been a personal matter for Ward, at least, but this ignores two very important matters.

Firstly, those fans who paid an exorbitant £25 to watch the ELRC deserved every available news about the line-up in order to make that choice, especially in these hard times. While, for most, speedway is the biggest attractor to meetings, there are some who pick and choose based on who they will see. I don’t like it, but it’s their right to do so, and we shouldn’t risk alienating those fans by treating them with contempt.

Secondly, and most importantly, the “news” IS GOING TO GET OUT. You can’t stop it. An off-the-cuff remark becomes gospel, an overheard snippet becomes testimony, and a worried look on the face of a promoter tells a thousand words.

In the close season speedway needs to re-consider its position on the internet and, in my opinion, open up further. All Elite League clubs have dedicated press officers, and there are pliant and not-so-pliant outlets for their sides of the story all over the world. They have a chance to seize this opportunity to bring the sport into the 21^st century. Or they could just keep blaming the gossipmongers, ostrich-like. I hope I’m wrong on which choice they make.