ITEM: The announcement yesterday that the Elite League Riders' Championship would take place in late March, rather than the traditional end-of-season slot it has occupied for - ooh - ever, took us all by surprise, and it took a few minutes of moaning about the loss of a great tradition before anyone noticed that the L had been dropped from ELRC. This is rather more significant that the loss of a letter usually is - unless that letter is the o in count - and changes the whole ball game.
The Elite Riders' Championship resurrects an idea from 2010, whereby the top riders from the 10 Elite League clubs - and I still can't believe they're sticking with that horrible name, but I digress - are joined by a select few from outside the league. It failed in 2010 because it was near the end of the season and the top riders were unwilling or unable to fit it into their schedule. In the end, that edition went ahead as normal, with no riders from outside the league taking part. The thinking on this occasion is that, by holding it before the Grand Prix riders depart for New Zealand, some of the GP riders will use it as a pre-season tune-up, and thus deign to honour us with their presence.
Outside the 10 EL number ones, there are just two GP riders riding in the Elite League this season and of those Chris Harris happens to be captaining Coventry, hosts for the meeting, and his appearance in the line-up therefore wouldn't be a surprise. Equally, Chris Holder and Nicki Pedersen continue to base themselves in the UK despite choosing richer pickings elsewhere and they, too, should be considered solid favourites to appear. Rory Schlein is the current holder of the ELRC title, and although this is a different kettle of fish, it would be harsh on him not to get to defend that title. That leaves two slots open, and seven GP riders who may be willing to take them, which should at least ensure that the organisers aren't paying over the top for their services. Of those, only Hampel, Sayfutdinov, and Jonsson are rare visitors to these shores and could draw a crowd - God knows we've all seen enough of Bjerre, Kasprzak, Lindgren, and Smolinski!
This is an event that can be sold to the general public as the very best of British speedway and, unlike the GP at Cardiff, it is entirely under the control of the BSPA. They can reap what they sow, get the rewards - and I don't necessarily mean financially - that some hard work and clever promotion would bring. A central location, on a weekend and at a convenient time for travelling fans, and most of the best riders in the world? What a fantastic opportunity to sell the sport!
Key to the success of the event is the ticket price, and this is where the BSPA can earn themselves some goodwill, and reward fans for backing their cost-cutting plans made at the AGM. However you dress it up - and you know I'm a big fan - the introduction of the fast track draft at reserve for the 2014 EL season is cost-cutting, but hasn't been accompanied by a corresponding reduction in ticket price for regular EL action. This is understandable, because the league was already operating beyond its means, and the vast majority of fans have accepted the reduction (for the best of reasons) and will turn up in numbers for their weekly fix of speedway. While the individual clubs may not be able to reduce the ticket price for their own meetings, the collective mass of the BSPA can afford to be charitable, especially given the fiasco that was last year's ELRC at Swindon.
The price for this kind of event has crept up to £25 of late, which is a lot of money at the best of times but never more than now, and with the cheapest tickets at the British GP only the price of a pint on top of that, it doesn't look much like value for money. With that in mind, and the poor PR that resulted from the 2013 ELRC and the reduction in quality of the 2014 EL without anything being given back to the fans, I would suggest £20 is the very most they should charge, with anything under that being a massive late Christmas for the loyal fans that have stuck with British speedway through thin and thin. It's also a price that wouldn't make too many new fans baulk at paying.
Just how the BSPA choose to play this will set their stall out for the rest of the season. Get it right and the current positive feeling that most people have about the 2014 season will continue into the summer. Get it wrong and the consequences could be worrying for the whole sport...
ITEM: There's always a but. There shouldn't be, but there always is. Scunthorpe Stags are to ride in the 2014 National League, which is fantastic news after they sat out 2013. Scunthorpe have been a mainstay of the third tier, even after the senior Scorpions side took the step up into the Premier League, and a season without them was an interruption in the flow of talent that has come through the Eddie Wright Raceway, although recent graduates Olly Greenwood, Max Clegg, and Danny Phillips found rides elsewhere, and the presence of the Castleford Kings in the MDL, operating out of Scunthorpe ensured it wasn't too broken.
Between them, Buxton and Scunthorpe can account for much of the young British talent in both senior leagues, and have given many of the National League's mainstays their first outings on a speedway bike. That they have struggled to finance their league campaigns in recent years is concerning, and reflects very badly on the rest of British speedway, and thus it is with some credit that Matt Ford - he of perennial pantomime villains the Poole Pirates - has stepped in to help finance the Stags' NL foray for 2014 (and hopefully beyond).
But - I told you - there's more to this than Ford stepping in to help a National League compete this season. If that was his intention, he has a club right on his doorstep (well, over the water a bit...) that is in desperate need of a saviour, and one that he has used as a pathway for young Australians on more than one occasion. And more than just enabling a Premier League club to run in the National League as well, an intercession at the Isle of Wight would save a whole club. But - there it is again - the Isle of Wight has no track record of producing its own talent - the logistics of travel to the island, and a smaller catchment area than north Lincolnshire/east Yorkshire, combining to prevent the same conveyor belt that operates at Scunthorpe, and therein lies the real reason for Ford's magnanimity.
Of course, nobody expects something for nothing these days, and if the price of Ford's involvement at Scunthorpe is cherry-picking the best talent coming through Richard Hollingsworth & Wayne Carter's training schools, then that's the way the business cookie must crumble. But - and there it is, for last time - it means nothing if there isn't a sea change at Wimborne Road in their use of British riders, both in actually using them in the first place and treating those they do use with a little more respect, patience, and care. This is the worrying aspect of the deal, not that Ford gets first pick of the best boys. What we absolutely don't want is a situation like that in Premier League football, whereby the big clubs are signing up the best young players and not using them, when other clubs would offer them far better opportunities.
Still, it's early days, and I'm willing to give anybody a chance. Well, almost anybody and usually Poole would be one of the exceptions, but for the future of British speedway I'm willing to play a waiting game and hope against hope that this all works out for the best. I'm sure it will - after all, they have a team manager who knows "what all kids do these days", so who better to mentor them?
ITEM: By now you'll have seen the 2014 fixtures and slotted them into your diaries. I hope you used a pencil, though, because they seem far from the finished article, aas visitors to this blog over the weekend may have discovered. Whilst Kings Lynn, Lakeside, and Poole can certainly be happy with their schedules, I'm not sure fans of Belle Vue, Birmingham, Coventry, Ipswich and Leicester can feel the same way, and I'd imagine there's a fair amount of tinkering still to be done until all concerned are happy.
One team I really feel for are Redcar, who signed Richard Lawson as their number one expecting his availability for all their fixtures this season, only for his contract to be transferred to his Elite League club Lakeside, and now have to go into almost a third of their fixtures without him. It's a risk you take when you sign a rider on loan, of course, but I can't help but feel there should be a cut-off for this kind of thing.
With 34 clubs racing every week, and far less than the 228 riders it would need for no rider to be duplicated in any team list, there are bound to be times when riders have to find themselves in two places at once. However, with all 7 weekdays being utilised somewhere, and Bank Holidays and weekends affording a variety of start times, the amount of clashes should be far less than it currently stands at, notwithstanding the massive job compiling this fixture list in the first instance. The majority of clubs with Grand Prix riders have managed to avoid any clashes, and you could forgive Coventry to a degree given Chris Harris wasn't a GP rider when this process was started (and I'll be disappointed if he misses a single fixture given how irreplaceable he is on that average), but for Belle Vue to travel to Coventry and Lakeside on GP weekends seems silly and you can only wonder what went through Mssrs Morton & Gordon's head when they agreed to that!
The majority of the rest of the clashes are with fast track draft riders, and you'd expect these to lessen once clubs learn the value of investing in young British talent (see Poole, above!), and of course if the draft continues (and the MDL, NJL, and NL continue to unearth talent) the number of available riders to fill those 228 slots should grow year on year, and thus the clashes reduce. For now, we have to put up with a certain amount of inconvenience and trust in the powers-that-be to smooth the ride as far as possible. Still some work to do on that front.
ITEM: Eurosport can't get enough of speedway! Having picked up the SGP series after Sky dropped it last year, and added the European Championships and their own Best Pairs competition to the schedule, they've announced that - in Europe at least - they'll be showing Swedish Elitserien speedway in 2014. With the Best Pairs expanding to three rounds, this should take the number of live speedway meetings on Eurosport to well over 30. If the UK arm of the channel is showing the Spedish sweedway (sic), too, then Eurosport would eclipse Sky as the premier broadcaster for speedway in this country, a complete switcharound on just two years ago.
All this makes you wonder if the BSPA might not have thought outside the box a little when it came to the broadcast of speedway on British TV. With a little investment it's not beyond the realms of possibility for the league to have produced its own broadcast-ready for Eurosport (or any other interested party) to show. There may be added complications with showing it live, but the beauty of a small-scale, off the radar sport like speedway is that not showing it live isn't going to impact its audience figures too much. It's not like a football match, with its every second revealed in full glory on news, social media, and in newspapers - a speedway meeting, for the casual audience, could have happened months ago, for all they know, and still retain its freshness.
All this is conjecture, of course, because as far as I'm aware, the 5-year deal with Sky blabbed to the media by Matt Ford still stands, whatever the delay in announcing it may be. A missed opportunity, then, but certainly something that - should the landscape look anywhere similar in 2019 - needs to be investigated, if new markets and new fans are to be found through TV.
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