ITEM: So Poole Pirates are the 2013 Elite League champions. Well done them. From the moment they reached the play-offs they were obviously the best team in it, and from that point on deserved to win the title, and I'll congratulate them on their application and professionalism. The story of how they got to those play-offs has been told so many times that if you haven't picked a side (plucky underdogs or cheating scum) yet, you're probably not likely to. So, yeah, they won the league. But just what did they win? The Elite League has just finished its seventeenth season. In that time it's had its fair share of ups and downs but never has it looked in worse shape than it does right now. For Poole to triumph in the last days of a dying competition has no real worth, like bald men fighting over a comb. That is covered in dead, flaky skin.
And what of the teams who don't even get to pretend they've won something worth winning? Birmingham, as has been detailed in this blog on a number of occasions, have experienced massive financial problems this season, choosing to ignore payment demands from other teams rather than cut costs, and all in pursuit of a title they didn't win. As it is, the 2013 season for Birmingham looks exactly the same as it does for eight other teams - trophyless. And, unless something miraculous happens, 2013 also sees the end of Alan Phillips and Chris Luty's time at the club, with the promotional rights reportedly reverting back to Tony Mole. Although Mole would never see the Brummies close, if it was within his power to ensure otherwise, he's not a fan of EL speedway, and certainly never was for Birmingham, and so it's unlikely that they will take their place in the top league in 2014 unless new blood - with fresh money to be bled by carny promoters - is found to take over. Was it worth it, Brummies?
The league's most northern club, Belle Vue, also had a season-to-forget, publicly shamed by being caught with their trousers down trying to postpone a fixture against Poole for all the wrong reasons. As a result, they were fined heavily, and lost the ability to call off their own meetings without SCB approval. This had a massive knock-on at the televised meeting with Poole later in the season, when the Aces were forced to stand by, looking like spare parts, as the TV people, the SCB, and the Pirates carved up a contrived result. The repercussions of that night will echo down the years, and it will be Belle Vue, as the staging club, that may feel them more heavily than others. The Aces finished ninth, only three points above a woeful Coventry, and were rumoured to be paying their number one a guaranteed £3-4000 a meeting. With crowds not the best, a good chunk of that money (and some overdue bills) was probably paid by wealthy backer George Carswell, but you can't help but think it might have better used for when they eventually move into the fantastic new stadium down the road. Farcical waterloggings, paying over the odds... was it worth it, Aces?
Bob Dugard revealed last week that Eastbourne's average crowd was a worrying 770 people (even under Poole's season low of 784 against Lakeside), and that he'd lost £5000 per meeting this season. Dugard has a similar story every winter, which makes you wonder why he continues to promote EL speedway at Arlington. I'm sure his love for the sport is as strong as it ever was, and perhaps he dreams of seeing another generation of Dugards (Connor & Kelsey are almost ready for senior speedway) pull on an Eagles' race-jacket, but with an average take per punter at EL tracks being around £13 he's missed his break-even attendance by 400 people per meeting, a ludicrous/super-optimistic budget error. This can only have been compounded by an all-foreign EL-only line-up, flying in riders from Sweden, the Czech Republic, Finland, and Russia rather than paying petrol money for a drive from the Midlands. Even faced with an opportunity to lower costs when Lukas Dryml got injured (again), the Eagles chose to fly over a young Dane rather than use a young Englishman. They finished eighth, and will continue into 2014 only through Bob Dugard's continued charity. Was it worth it, Eagles?
Like Dugard and the Eagles, Peterborough's continued existence (at least at the level of spending they currently "enjoy") is down to one man - Rick Frost. Frost's cash was used to assemble a side to win the EL at last, gambling heavily on a septet of riders focussed solely (in the UK, at least) on racing in the EL for the Panthers. A mid-season reshuffle, which claimed the scalp of Jan Staechmann - undoubedly a nice man but with one of the worst records of any team manager in speedway - and several riders, tells you all you need to know about how [i]that[/i] turned out, but a subsequent increase in form almost saw them sneak into the play-offs. Until, that is, an SCB appeal committee and an SCB-backed farce at Belle Vue combined to wreck their hopes on the very same day. As it is, Peterborough finished in seventh place, and Frost must be wondering why he keeps throwing his money at a sport which seems determined to keep him off the honours list. More money spent, no real results - was it worth it, Panthers?
I could go on - fans and promoters of just about every club has to be asking themselves the same question, whether publicly or privately, and just about everyone bar a handful of Pirates fans agrees that there has be big changes made this winter. For once speedway has to look to the long-term, and ensure that all the leagues are fit for purpose well into the 2020s. We can't go on with a league structure that allows wealthy men to prop up unprofitable clubs, even if they're happy to do so, and we can't allow clubs to leech off others in pursuit of success. Contracts have to be transparent at the point of registration - and rejected if they do not make financial sense - and regulations have to be transparent to all. Unlike many other professional sports, speedway is almost entirely dependent on its fans' generosity, and those fans have to be included rather than excluded as far as possible.
The Elite League - and I'd start by scrapping that name and re-branding afresh, for one - has to be worthy of its position as one of the top leagues in the world. It has to have strong competition, strong governance, and a strong selling point. Get all three right and whoever wins the title in 2014 - even if it is Poole - can genuinely call themselves champions of something worth winning.
ITEM: It's usually around this time that they announce the wild cards for next season's Grand Prix series. Last year they took an unprecedented amount of time - ironically, I'm told, because there was some discussion over whether the Britain should receive a wild card, and if they did whether Tai Woffinden was the right man for it - but there's nothing to suggest that this year won't be a mostly straightforward decision.
Chris Holder, injured partway through the series as reigning champion, is one hundred percent, nailed-on to receive one, and if you can find a bookmaker willing to give you any sort of odds on him [i]not]/i] getting one, bite their hands off. Similarly, Tomasz Gollob has competed in sixteen straight SGP series, was world champion only three years ago, and finished in ninth place, just one outside the top eight seeds. Although age counts against him, he is not the oldest man in the field, and as long as he retains his enthusiasm (and popularity in the important Polish market), he'll be welcome in BSI's house.
The third choice has to be a Swede, although none made the top eight in 2013. Sweden will once again have two Grands Prix in 2014 and it's unthinkable to consider there won't be a permanent wild card wearing the blue & yellow flag next year. Just who will be gifted that place is less certain. Freddie Lindgren finished eleventh in the series standings, two places and nineteen points ahead of Andreas Jonsson. However, Jonsson missed two rounds due to injury, and it's thought that this might give him the upper hand on his compatriot. Antonio Lindback, marketable but frustratingly erratic, came last of the series' fifteen regular riders, and faces a season in limbo, since he didn't qualify for qualifying (if you know what I mean!) in 2014. The other outside chance, perennial event wild card Thomas H Jonasson, is injury-prone and unproven at this level. Interestingly, Jonsson has aleady been announced as a series wild card for the 2014 European Championships - as have SGP regulars Nicki Pedersen and Emil Sayfutdinov - and whether the bubbling tensions between BSI and SEC break out full-scale war may have a bearing on BSI's decision.
Also nominated as a wild card for the European Championships is the man widely tipped to be in the driving seat for the final wild card nomination - Grigorij Laguta. Laguta is arguably one of the top riders outside of the current SGP series, with consistently good performances in the Swedish and Polish leagues not going unnoticed by the organisers. Laguta is also popular in Latvia, who again will stage a GP in 2014, and was once reported to have been seeking citizenship (it is thought he would not pass their stringent language tests). However, the Lagutas have had all kinds of issues with visas to ride in western European nations (brother Artem, a GP rider in 2011, missed the British and Italian rounds through visa problems, and both men have missed several other FIM commitments due to this issue), and the Russians have firmly thrown themselves behind SEC. These aside, it should be hard to ignore Laguta's claim.
Other long-odds contenders include Michael Jepsen Jensen (disappointing year by his early standards, and with two Danes already in), Patryk Dudek (World Under-21 Champion, but would be a fourth Polish rider), and Martin Vaculik (who never really got going in 2013, and has expressed a desire for a year out). Beyond that, a second British rider seems implausible, and there is no-one at the required level from any nation outside the top two who wouldn't look out of place in that company. You might, as an extremely outside bet, look to Finland's Joonas Kylmakorpi, who has won several world titles in the Longrack discipline, is a capable speedway rider in good competition, and would help sell the inaugural Finnish GP to a new market. Worth a quid, at least.
Whoever gets the nod, it's another SGP series with far too many rounds to sustain serious interest but should be competitive, at least at the top end. Although it has received minor tweaks over its eighteen season history, and has doubled the amount of rounds in a bid to expand its appeal, you have to wonder whether it's not time for something a little bit different. Still, a lot of fans seem happy with what they're being served up, so I will err on the side of their happiness, for once. For me, though (and others like me), the politics behind the series will always be far more interesting than what takes place on the track.
ITEM: Australians don't arrive on these shores as novice riders, never having ridden a speedway bike, and find themselves handily in possession of the necessary talent to fill half the team slots available in British speedway. There is a thriving youth speedway scene down under, and it is this - and a parallel flat track scene - that provides these future world champions with the skills they put to such good use in the northern hemisphere. Similarly, the Danes, Swedes, and Poles - all of whom have dominated world speedway at various points over the last two decades - have their own junior speedway competitions, with pre-teen youngsters riding scaled-down bikes in Europe-wide championships, gaining a solid grounding to become the stars - and second-strings - of the future.
Britain has been slow to put any kind of structure in place that would ape the success of its rivals, previously relying on the generosity of parents, individual clubs, and the grasstrack scene (which [i]has[/i] looked to youth for some time) for its new blood. For the large part, promoters - and fans - have expected the finished article to appear at the pits gate at 16, ready to race and eager to please, without thinking where this production line actually started. When it began to dry up - and, it must be remembered, even our first world champion for thirteen years is largely a product of the Australian youth system - they scratched their heads and looked to ever more average Europeans and Antipodeans to fill the gap. The result? Less and less British riders in team slots, and less and less able to compete on the world stage. Oh, and Lubos Tomicek.
I'm not here to bury youth speedway in this country, however, but to praise it. In recent years, steps have been taken - and fully supported by the BSPA and the majority of its member clubs - to arrest this chain of events, and youth speedway is firmly back on the agenda in the UK. The British Youth Championships encompasses half a dozen rounds, and is staged on Elite, Premier, National, and non-league tracks, and graduates from that system have begun to filter into 1-7s, alongside their more traditionally-recruited compatriots. With EL team managers Phil Morris and Neil Vatcher overseeing things, there is a clear path for youngsters to follow (or there will be once the PL gets its house in order, [i]vis a vis[/i] British riders), and if we aren't competing on the biggest stages in years to come it won't be for lack of effort on their part.
Clubs that aren't directly party to supporting the Youth Championships have also played their part, by including youngsters as "souped-up mascots", familiarising fans who are perhaps unwilling to give a chance to lads starting out with the names they'll be watching in future years, but I'd like to see it formalised a little more, if it is in any way possible. At Leicester for the Midland Development League Riders' Championship the other week, in between blocks of four races, we were treated to four races featuring under-16s, on 125cc bikes. The lads took to the track with increasing confidence, and the times got faster, and it helped break up the boredom between those "two rides on the trot" breaks in individual meetings. In the German second division they go a step further, and include the scores of 125cc races (with one rider per club in a four-team format) in the final meeting result. Something similar was tried at last weekend's free meeting at Redcar, and if it all possible it should be encouraged here.
More and better British speedway riders benefits every one of us, down the line. They will make British speedway cheaper to run, enable more clubs to thrive and survive, and give our kids local heroes to idolise. It's up to all of us to support it, wherever we can, because if nothing else I'm sick of these Australians doing it right when we're not. That's just not cricket!
ITEM: Redcar face Somerset tonight in the final Premier League play-off semi-final meeting, the semi-finals in the second division being run in a mini-league format. Any one of the three teams in the mini-league - Newcastle are the other one - could progress to the final, but it's going to take a freak result for it to be anyone other than the Rebels*. Allowing for the quite reasonable assumption that either Somerset or - their opponents in the final - Edinburgh will be unable to stage a meeting tomorrow night, that leaves just 13 days to fit in - and promote! - a two-legged final, where both participants race on a Friday. Obviously one of them is going to have switch race-days - easier for the Rebels than the Monarchs, who share their stadium with some flea-bitten mutts - but even so, and allowing for the weather at this time of year, it's going to be quite a squeeze.
This situation has been brought about by the unwieldy format, as much as by some inclement weather, and it's obvious that it's not a workable solution to include six teams in the end-of-season play-offs. It doubles the amount of fixtures required to find a winner, and allows the prospect of the sixth-placed team winning the title when fourth place is stretches credibility to its limit. It also requires an earlier cut-off date, plunging the rest of the league into staging fixture fillers or shutting down early, with most teams having shut up shop before the leaves start to turn orange on the trees.
In the Elite League, the demands of Sky TV have seen the play-offs stretched out over a four-week period, with clubs forced to run on Monday nights to suit the broadcaster. There's no doubt that play-offs are good for the sport - they provide an end-of-season bang when, in most years, the season might just whimper out, but allowing clubs to stage their home legs on their regular race nights would not only help them maximise revenues, it would also squeeze the play-off meetings closer together, and allow for a later cut-off date in the EL, too. Hopefully, if Sky finally deign to tell us whether they're going to be showing the EL in 2014 or not, this can be taken into consideration, and the season can truly end in a suitable fashion.
There's no simple answer to scheduling meetings in a sport so vulnerable to the extremes of British weather, but we're not helping it at all. A little more thought, and a little more care taken over the placing of cut-off dates and play-off reserved dates, and we might just get there. Another thing to sort out - I'll add it ot the list!
[* Redcar win by 36 points or more - Redcar progress. Redcar win by 21-35 points - Newcastle progress. Redcar win by less than 20, or any other result - Somerset progress]
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