ITEM: So I wrote on Monday that, despite your view of his various misdemeanours and the strokes he's pulled over the years, Matt Ford can at least be described as a shrewd and capable promoter. Well, I take that back. He's a cowboy, a charlatan - no better than Belle Vue. Okay, maybe that's going too far...
Speedway promoters have long harped that the only meetings that draw crowds are league fixtures. This is perhaps unsurprising - league competition dominates pretty much all sports in the UK, and has done since William McGregor created the Football League back in the 19th century. But for this to be true those matches have to mean something, the competition fair and seen to be fair, and each team should approach its fixtures with the team it has at that time, whether carrying injuries or out of form riders - it's just how it is, the luck of the draw.
Yesterday Matt Ford did a bad thing. Having reacted to Poole's poor start to the season by changing his team around, he received the news that one of his new signings, Przemyszlaw Pawlicki, wouldn't be able to ride because of a minor injury sustained in the pursuit of world championship glory. Since Pawlicki was yet to ride for Poole, a quirk in the regulations meant his absence could only be covered by a 6-point PL rider, thus weakening Poole's team to unacceptable (to Ford) levels.
Ford did have another option - to revert back to his previous 1-7, without Pawlicki and Thomas H Jonasson, but with a new average coming into effect for Rohan Tungate, he would have been unable to once again declare the new side. This, he claims, would have unfair to the new riders, and have financial considerations with contracts already drawn up (although his contracts with Darcy Ward & Kyle Howarth are okay to be ripped up, it seems), although few outside Dorset believe that he wouldn't consider this for anything other than he wouldn't be able to make his desired changes, regardless of any monetary concerns.
Plenty of Elite League teams have run with a 6-point PL rider in place of an absent team member. This season, Swindon were forced to go to King's Lynn without their number one, and Poole themselves faced Eastbourne without Maciej Janowski. In 2011, Coventry were left with no choice but to track Todd Kurtz in place of Emil Sayfutdinov on several occasions, and all got on with it without much complaint. The one team that did try to engineer a situation which would have seen them avoid such a sanction was Belle Vue, a few weeks ago against Poole, and look how that turned out!
Ford's argument is that, by running with a 6-point PL rider in place of Pawlicki, the meeting would not have been worthy of the Elite League. As I've just said, plenty of other meetings have taken place under these conditions, an they were all deemed worthy by the Elite League, the BSPA, and SCB to be declared as Elite League results. It's just one of those things, an unfortunate side effect of modern speedway.
What he really meant was that he was worried that he wouldn't attract a decent crowd to watch a meeting with a weakened Poole team, especially against a Lakeside team that won at Wimborne Road a few weeks ago. That the full-strength Pirates couldn't handle a lacklustre Hammers side (in front of less than 800 fans it is rumoured, although I'm happy to be corrected), is unfortunate, but it happens to teams in all sports.
Poole's crowds are down because they don't want to see a losing team. But somebody has to lose, unless we are to engineer home victories for all our teams now, in the interest of helping promoters earn - or not lose - money. And this is the crux of the matter - if we are postponing meetings to avoid the chance of home defeats (and this is why the fans won't come - if Poole were top of the league, with 6 riders in great form, Ford wouldn't give a second thought to running with a PL 6-pointer), then what does the fixture list mean anymore? What does the league mean anymore? Can we call speedway a sport? Or is it sports entertainment, closer to professional wrestling than a bona fide, actual professional sport?
Belle Vue were fined £5000 and deducted 3 league points for their abysmal attempt at a postponement a few weeks back, and rightly so. They sought to gain an advantage over their opponents, and thus the rest of the league, by artificially manipulating their fixtures beyond the already-lenient elbow room given to teams when deciding the fixture list to avoid clashes with riders' other commitments. What is so different about what Poole have done? Nothing, that's what. Oh, except one tiny thing...
Lakeside appear to have "reluctantly" agreed to a postponement, according to a statement on their website. It's not "reluctantly" at all because they could have insisted the fixture went ahead. They also claimed that they were eager to continue their run of form - well, what better way to return to a track where you've already won against a further weakened home team? A cynical observer may surmise that there was an inducement, or they perhaps agreed to avoid a sanction threatened by the home promoter, because nothing else makes sense, but I'm sure that's not the case. Maybe Lakeside will give their reasons, but I won't hold my breath.
Ford told his local paper, the Evening Echo, that he will escape sanction because of Lakeside's collusion. This is probably true, but it doesn't make what he's done any easier to swallow. The BSPA now have a choice to make - do they allow this to happen with no complaint, no censure, no punishment, or do they stand up for proper league competition? Too many people are eager to run down British speedway, and the quality of our league - let's at least try and maintain the illusion that it is a league, with a proper fixture list and meetings that mean something, yeah?
Or we can allow it to happen without comment. And give up any pretence of proper competition. Either/or.
STOP PRESS to the STOP PRESS! Lakeside have released a statement this morning that claims they "reluctantly" agreed to the cancellation because they were given no choice, and that they were in no position to "force" a meeting to take place. Interesting...
I suspect the real story will be quietly "leaked" over the next few days. I said last night that I suspected that Lakeside were indeed given no choice - for what reasons this would be the case is a whole other story though. In fairness, Jon Cook has proved himself happy enough to "make his presence felt" in the past, and so is in little position to claim injured innocence now.
ReplyDeleteWe'll see....