False Averages & False Advertising

ITEM: I want to start this week by writing a little about Ricky Ashworth. Now, as far as I can recall, I don't think I've ever seen Ashworth ride. I may be missing a memory here and there - perhaps a guest appearance in the Elite League - but I've never seen Sheffield ride, and haven't seen Berwick for over twenty years, so I'm probably right about that. Regardless, that doesn't diminish my respect for him, or mean that - as a fairly successful, not totally past it Brit - I haven't been keeping my eye on his career.

As the vast majority of you will know, Ashworth was involved in a serious accident at Scunthorpe on Friday night, and - at the time of writing - remains unconscious in a Hull hospital. While there appear to be no broken bones, he has already missed a chunk of the season with a head injury, and doctors are understandably cautious. Hopefully, though, what I've just written will soon be rendered pointless and he'll be sitting up in bed enjoying a cup of tea and reflecting on how much it's going to cost him to get that bike up and running again. I witnessed what I thought, at the time, might have been a fatal crash earlier this season, when Adam Roynon fell and was unavoidably hit by a trailing Josh Auty at Brandon. The sick feeling I felt then is something I don't want to ever experience again, and it returned a little on Friday night when I read about Ashworth's crash. I don't know the full story, and unusually for a gossip-hound like myself, I don't really want to know the details - I just hope he's up and about soon.

Last night at Berwick just happened to be the annual collection for the Speedway Riders Benevolent Fund, and the Bandits' fans are renowned for giving a heft amount (so much they were granted to the SRBF benefit meeting earlier this season). I've heard the buckets were brimming with cash and it really is no surprise. Accidents like this bring it home to us just how important it is that we look after these guys. Some of them may be knobs of the highest order but as a unit the risks they take (albeit well-paid in some cases) should carry with them a monetary safety blanket should they need it. The next time the SRBF bucket is passed round at your track, please dig deep - a little goes a long, long way.

[As an afterthought, and if anyone from the SRBF is reading, can we have another collection at Coventry, please? The last one was held on the same day as the Peterborough collection, and a good chunk of Bees' fans had already given at Alwalton! I'm sure, given the chance, we could match any track's contribution and bring the BenFund meeting to Brandon...]

ITEM: I wrote last week about Greg Hancock's return to British speedway with Poole, and how it was very much a marriage of convenience, despite the hype supplied by people who should know better. Now we know, of course, that it didn't happen, at least not when it was supposed to have, and this is a very interesting thing indeed.

The big story on Tuesday evening was that Hancock's paperwork hadn't been completed - that a delay at the British embassy in Stockholm was putting his debut at Wimborne Road, against former club Coventry, in serious doubt. As it turns out, the paperwork wasn't completed in time, and Poole were able to have their cake and eat it by reverting back to their side without Hancock, using rider replacement for the injured Chris Holder. But all the hullabaloo surrounding the televised Wednesday appearance of the former world champion obscured a telling example of how our sport treats its fans, largely with contempt and like mushrooms (best kept in the dark).

Because if Hancock's paperwork wasn't completed for the Wednesday night meeting at Poole, how was he supposed to have made his debut - as advertised - at Kirkmanshulme Lane, against Belle Vue, two days before?

As it happens, the Belle Vue meeting fell victim to the rain, but at no point before - or after - the postponement did anyone from Belle Vue, Poole, or the speedway press even hint that Hancock might have not been there? Of course, I may be being uncharitable, and the Manchester club were fully intending to announce to what probably would have been a bumper crowd that they shouldn't attend if Hancock was the only reason for doing so. Or maybe they didn't know, and would have had a rude awakening when the Poole team arrived without him? Or perhaps, as with so many other examples down the years, those travelling to the track would have been faced with a hand-written, A4 notice, blu-tacked to the turnstiles, announcing Hancock's absence?

Although I doubt Hancock's return will have as much impact as some less-careworn commentators, it is a story that can be sold to good commercial and promotional effect. What we can't afford is to false sell such appearances, because that sort of carny approach makes you more enemies than customers. Trying to sell a 43-year old to a weary public might smack of rearranging to deck chairs on the Titanic, but that iceberg is a way off yet and we don't want to do anything that might hasten its arrival, eh?

ITEM: So if you've been reading for the past few weeks, you'll know that I've been suggesting changes to the rules that might see the sport in a better place next season. I don't claim to have the answers, and I imagine promoting a speedway club is a horribly complex and unrewarding affair, but a gentle nudge - even into debate - is something I can very much do. The promoters will soon sit down for their pre-AGM meeting, where the things they'll discuss at the AGM itself are tabled, and hopefully here's a wind of change blowing through the conference room at Rugby. If not, get the fan on, Price!

* Ban the tuning of engines

                    One of the biggest talking points in speedway at the moment is cost. It's becoming more and more expensive to enter the sport, let alone compete at any level, and that cost is passed on to the promoter, and then onto the fan. If we can bring costs down for the rider, it is argued, then we can bring costs down at all levels, and this is obviously something that no-one can argue with. So why do we put up with the parasitical practice of engine tuning? Would it not be possible to insist on all riders riding in British leagues to use factory-sealed engines? I'm not technical expert, but I imagine there is a way you can tell if an engine has been fiddled with - if we can do that, surely we can enforce a "no tuning" rule? The advantages are obvious and enticing. Every bike would, presumably (again, I'm a technical idiot here), have the same potential speed and power, and thus the playing field between those who can afford (or choose to invest in) tuning and those who can't (or don't) will narrow. The negatives are that it would make redundant several former riders making a living off this sort of thing, but given their potential customer base falls with every passing year, is it not merely a mater of time for them anyway? Is this possible? I'm seriously interested to find out.

* Give riders ONE average

                    I wrote above about the pitfalls of using different averages in different leagues. It's a complicated mess than could easily be avoided by weighting the points scored in the various leagues rather than the averages they contribute towards. So, for example, rider A has an Elite League average of 4.00 (gained from 40 points from 40 rides) and a Premier League average of 10.00 (100 points from 40 rides). This gives him two different applicable EL averages when the conversion factor of 0.6 is applied - 4.00 and 6.00. However, if the PL points are converted first, and then added to the EL points, he gets one usable average of 5.00 (100 points from 80 rides). It's not a perfect system, and the difference in figures shows that Peter Adams golden conversion of 0.6 is often wildly inaccurate, but it works better than the chopping and changing between figures we use now. Alternatively, we could just use an EL average in the EL, and a PL average in the PL, but that seems far too simple somehow...

* Reduce the amount of matches contributing towards a rolling average

                    I can see why rolling averages were brought in - far too often teams were able to take advantage of an early season slump by a particular rider and utilise him at reserve on a seemingly false average (operating under the assumption that form is temporary and class is permanent, I presume). However, what it has actually done is to penalise whole teams with poor early season form, and especially punish some riders who are recovering from often quite serious injuries. What seems to have happened far too often is that teams struggling at the bottom of tables have been unable to strengthen because the rolling averages carried by their riders are unrepresentative of their current form, whilst teams further up have been able to take advantage of certain riders' upturns in form to further improve even an already successful team. This can;t be conducive to evening out team strengths, which is why we have a points limit in the first instance. The theory of assessing a rider's current form over a full season's worth of meetings is, of course, sound. However, given the uneven nature of the fixture list, and that some newcomers to the leagues have averages based on ten or twelve meetings rather than the twenty-eight currently used in the EL (and more in the PL), unbalances the principle towards uselessness. I would argue that twelve meetings is a far better bellwether of current form than anything longer, and would still rule out artificial manipulation of averages.

ITEM: The SCB sprang into action this week, altering the result of the King's Lynn vs Peterborough meeting from July 24th, and overturning a home victory into a big away win. The biggest winners from this decision are Poole, who find themselves within spitting distance of the play-offs now that one of their rivals for the spot have lost vital league points. The SCB also acted quickly and decisively when Belle Vue farcically postponed their home meeting with Poole, lied about the reason, and then failed to admit their guilt. Strangely, the SCB haven't acted yet on Poole's own shoddy postponement, against Lakeside, when the rulebook suggested they were unentitled to do such a thing. A cynical man might even think that the rules are bent in Poole's favour, but enough of that - let's look at what King's Lynn actually did wrong.

The Stars were missing their young Danish prospect Niklas Porsing. As always, they sought to find a decent guest and landed upon former squad member Kozza Smith. Although Smith averages just 3.43 his current form in the Elite League is much better than that, and so even though they were giving away 0.57 from Porsing's assessed 4.00 average, the Stars were confident that Smith would do a job for them. And so it proved, with his 13 points the difference between winning and losing. King's Lynn submitted their team to the BSPA before the meeting, and it was checked by referee Dave Watters, and both approved the line-up (or at least failed to notice any irregularities in it). However, the peculiarities of the regulations are such that - despite it being an EL meeting, featuring EL teams, on an EL track - the average that King's Lynn should have used was Smith's Premier League average. Which, when converted using the calculation used between leagues, is 4.45 - 0.45 over Porsing's average.

What muddies the waters even further is that both Porsing and his fellow King's Lynn reserve Andreijs Lebedevs have assessed averages, with the Latvian being assessed half a point better than the Dane. This difference is vital, because if they'd both been assessed at 4.00, Smith would have been allowed to guest for Porsing. Furthermore, Smith's converted average is based on his rolling average from 2012/13 - on his current Premier League form he'd have been fine to guest even on that average. It's all numbers, right? And everybody gets numbers wrong once in a while. Except that this mistake should have been caught long before the teams took to track - by the BSPA, the meeting referee, and both team managers - and nobody noticed a thing wrong. The meeting went ahead, fifteen races were raced, and the fans went home happy (well, the home fans, at least).

It's often said that speedway has too many rules. The rulebook is quite thick, but most of it refers to things that don't really affect the day-to-day business of a speedway meeting. The issue is not the amount of rules, or even the complexity, it's the contradictions inherent within, where one rule appears to say one thing, and another turns it on is head a few pages later. There's plenty wrong with speedway, we all know that. But, as I've argued before, what speedway gets right so often is that we race 15 heats with 4 riders doing 4 laps, of varying quality I grant you, but mostly with the same exciting result. Once we begin tinkering with the results of races or meetings after the fact, when there was ample opportunity for all parties concerned to raise an objection beforehand, we begin to make a mockery of things. I'm not excusing cheating - I'm asking for vigilance but acceptance if things are missed. Speedway fans want to see two teams of seven riders racing whenever possible - they don't much care how those seven riders are put together, for the most part. By reducing the sport down to the minutiae of a contradictory rulebook, we just look silly.