S.S., N.L., N.Z. & I.T.K.

ITEM: When I first started going to speedway, back in the heady days of the late 1980s, you had a choice of which weekly speedway magazine to buy – the Speedway Star or the Speedway Mail. I always preferred the Mail for some reason – it seemed a little more irreverent and gossipy than its glossy rival – but I bought both, anyway. I think most people who bought the Mail also bought the Star, too. Just not enough of them to keep both in business, it seems.

Nowadays it’s the Star or nothing. Well, not nothing, because there’s the internet to contend with, often meaning that by the time the Star reaches the newsagents the news it carries is out of date. Occasionally, due to compliance from the tracks, the odd bit of exclusive news will break, but mostly it’s days old, with all the disadvantages that brings.

The content of the Star has changed little over the years, and sales seem to have held up enough to make it a profitable exercise, so they can’t be doing too much wrong. You’ll never please anyone, of course, and to my mind there’s too much SGP coverage, too many “correspondants” willing to toe the party the line, and not enough investigative journalism. Others will complain that there’s too much opinion, too little SGP, and that they like to read what’s going on at their local track, even if it is straight from the promoter’s mouth, so what do I know?

I’m not about to tell Pinegen, the Speedway Star’s publishers what to put in their magazine, not without taking a major financial stake in the company, anyway, but it’s no secret that many readers prefer the winter editions of the Star, when news is perhaps thinner on the ground than in the summer months, to the regular season ones. Brian Burford can always be relied upon for interesting, thought-provoking articles, and the lack of urgency in reporting events allows the editorial staff to flex their wings a little. I’d like to see more of this all year round, even if some of the usual content has to be sacrificed.

Until the late 1980s, the Speedway Star was a sister publication to World Soccer, and that magazine has always carried op-ed pieces from its various correspondents, from long-time editor Keir Radnidge, US reporter Paul Gardner, and veteran journalist Brian Glanville, and these sit well with the usual results, news, features, and interviews from the world of, well, soccer. Freeing up the local correspondents, too, perhaps finding some who aren’t in the employ of the track they report on, might also provide a slightly different voice to the copy and pasted, available on the internet days before, stuff that fills its pages now.

The Star has developed, and with an eye on digital media, it’s true. They have begun producing Speedway Star Xtra, available through the website (although unwieldy for those of us who’d prefer to print it out and read it on the toilet!), and this is a very good thing. But it’s a start, not a finish, and I’m sure Richard Clark, Philip Rising, and the rest of the staff realise it.

For all I’ve said, on most weeks the Star is still a cracking read. A lack of competition, though, can’t allow it to rest on its laurels. It needs to make itself indispensible, not an add-on, and a new year always brings new opportunities.

ITEM: Speedway is at a crossroads. The AGM next week will be a humdinger, with so many things to sort out that they may need to book into the hotel for an extra week just to get through the agenda. All three divisions are having their issues at the moment, although things look much brighter for the Premier League than they did a few weeks ago (and may even get a surprise addition to boot), and they really need to set their stall out for the next few years.

Nowhere is that more important than the National League. The third tier of British speedway is a bit of a Frankenstein creation, made up of teams of varying resources and aims, and is struggling to be all things to all clubs. It needs to find a way to allow standalone, ambitious clubs such as Dudley and Mildenhall to exist in the same league as de facto reserve sides from King’s Lynn and Rye House, as well as clubs who’ve been bigger and downsized, such as Stoke and the Isle of Wight, and clubs who have no intention of being anything other than they are now – Buxton – to compete on the same playing field. It’s not an easy task, but here’s why it’s so important.

Because there are new tracks hoping to open in Bristol, Norwich, Sittingbourne, and Cornwall and these prospective tracks need to be able to thrive from day one, promoting a speedway product sufficient to attract and keep new and lapsed fans from these areas. Speedway needs these clubs – twenty-seven tracks operating in a country with our speedway heritage is disappointing, to say the least, and with half those tracks always on the brink of financial ruin, we need the numbers to take away the risk of a 1958 scenario (which you can read about in this week’s Speedway Star – cheap plug).

The National League is also important for the development of young, British talent, of course, and that is one area even the most optimistic of us has to agree has been lacking of late. Still, the green shoots are beginning to show, and it’s interesting to note that, as well as giving first rides to nascent talents, the league this year had several riders who some would argue had outgrown it. Those riders – Adam Roynon, Ashley Birks, and Richie Worrall, to name but three – came on leaps and bounds, in no small part, I’d argue, to the extra rides, on varying tracks, that riding in the NL afforded them.

This is an area where the NL could do more. What did British speedway gain from Kyle Newman, Kyle Howarth, and Simon Lambert not riding in the NL this season? Little to nothing. Would British speedway have gained further from the likes of Luke Bowen, Richard Lawson, and Ben Wilson riding in the NL? I think you could argue that it would have, assuming they were all willing to ride for the points money on offer – young riders will only get better racing against better opponents, and the Development Leagues are providing opportunities for those riders who under previous regimes may have been looked at as NL reserves. Better quality at the top filters down.

It’s becoming clear that the National League is a professional league in all but management. The money on offer to the riders may be less, but they are expected to be professional in their approach, and the promoters and management of the tracks are also expected to adhere to the regulations set down in the rule book. Except when they aren’t, and this is a big part of why the NL isn’t working.

What Peter Morrish has achieved is admirable. He, along with an army of helpers, turned a league for fading veterans and budding wannabes into a practical third tier of British speedway. But all things have their time, and I believe that, if the rules are right, and more importantly watertight, there’s no need for an overseer who can overrule them. Morrish’s position is an anachronism for the NL, and if they are to move forward – and be fit for the future – he has to go gracefully. A modern league should be transparent and sensible, not subject to the whims of an albeit knowledgeable and experienced benign dictator.

Whatever they decide, I hope the National League is fit for purpose in 2013. The prospect of Coventry and Plymouth swelling the numbers to ten (assuming Dudley stay put, which is in the balance), and perhaps even Norwich taking part, means more than ever the league will need careful attention and enthusiastic support. Give the fans a reason to watch the NL, give them riders to get excited about, and give them a well-run league, and they should repay you in kind.

ITEM: What do Argentina and New Zealand have in common? Well, apart from both playing rugby union for some stupid reason, and both having their fair share of Welsh expats, they’re the newest areas to receive world speedway’s patronage.

With the SGP in New Zealand, and the first in the southern hemisphere since 2002’s Australian SGP, firmly on the calendar, the FIM decided to take the world under-21 championship to Argentina, which has been a strange yet thriving outpost for speedway for quite some time. Crowd levels in Bahia Blanca put most other tracks outside Poland to shame, and local enthusiasm for dirt track racing seems enormous. Troops of mostly central European riders have trekked to Argentina in the winter off-season for some years, and recently some of their riders have made in-roads into European speedway, with Emiliano Sanchez, Carlos Villar, and now Nico Covatti turning heads especially in the UK.

The young locals taking part as wild cards in the under-21 finals may have struggled – and there were more of them than usual due to the logistics and reluctance of some riders to travel so far for so little reward – but it’s clear that Argentina deserves its place on the calendar. New Zealand, on the other hand, is a different kettle of fish.

The nation has a huge speedway heritage – the names Ronnie Moore, Barry Briggs, and Ivan Mauger will always ensure that. Latterly, and since Mitch Shirra finally retired in 1993, they have struggled, with Andrew Bargh, Grant Tregoning, and Jade Mudgway being the pick of the crop, struggling at anything higher than Premier League reserve. Such is the dearth of talent in New Zealand speedway presently that Jason Bunyan, seven times NZ champion and married to a Kiwi, was chosen ahead of any native riders as the wild card for the inaugural NZ SGP in March, and - no disrespect to Bunyan – even he was well out of his depth.

So why has a struggling speedway scene like New Zealand been given a prestigious SGP ahead of a hotbed like Argentina? Money, of course. BSI, the corporate owners of speedway’s world championships, found a local willing to put up some money, and considered the market untapped and viable. Horrible word, market, but there you go. In a sensible world, money paid by BSI to the NZ speedway authorities for the rights to hold an SGP there should be spent on bringing through the next generation of Briggs and Maugers (or even a David Bargh and Mark Thorpe!), but our world is far from sensible. New Zealand speedway will probably limp along, as it has done for the past two decades, with predictable results on its standing on the world stage.

So what about Argentina? Will it get the SGP it deserves? Only if there’s a local willing to put up the cash, it seems, or if the city of Buenos Aires opens its doors – and stadiums – to BSI. Nothing is impossible but many things are likely. With New Zealand and Italy still on the SGP list, despite their international shortcomings, and with Prague being chosen by BSI as host city for the SWC in 2013 (and the Czechs under-strength team seeded through the final as a result), BSI have shown that it’s the market that counts, and the rest be damned. May they reap what they sow.

ITEM: Just a final note about gossip and rumours. I love them. The world would be so much less exciting and interesting without them. I like to read them, and if they’re delicious enough, pass them on. What’s a world without tittle-tattle? Boring, that’s what.

Having said that, occasionally you become privy to information that you really should share, but there are also very good reasons why you can’t. If a rider is scoring badly because he’s been caught cheating on his wife, for example. It may be exciting to talk about, and may even get some angry fans off his back if they knew there was a reason for him underperforming, but people’s lives are worth more than the brief thrill you’d get from knowing it.

Or if the information you’re passed is commercially sensitive in a way which could damage one of our few clubs. Let’s say a club had a new track lined up, but revealing it early could jeopardise the deal. Nothing that can be gained from everyone knowing about it before it’s ready to be announced is worth the potential loss of that track.

And for the informant themselves, no gossip or piece of insider information is worth risking a ban from the track where they watch the sport they love, so some rumours and breaking news have to stay secret, only fit for hinting at and whispering about.

It’s a hard life being a guttersnipe. My aim is to open speedway up a bit more, get people talking about things that should be discussed, and provoke debate, support or dissent when the wrong decisions appear to have been, or are about to be, made. Bear with me, I’ll try to tell you what I think you need to know. It’s a tough job, but somebody has to do it.