ITEM: I was going to use this space to write a review of the Coventry season. I did one last year, and it’s only fitting that this year’s disaster gets its fair kicking. But that can wait until next week because, for once, I’m giddy with some happy news about speedway!
ITEM: Cycle speedway and our version of the sport share more than
just a name and a four-lap racing connection. The fortunes of the two sports -
desperately unfashionable yet clinging on in outposts up and down the country -
have always been similar, and in the motorised speedway's heyday of the 1950s
and 1960s more than a few speedway riders had their first taste of shale action
on a pushbike, before grasstrack took over as the primary feeder for speedway
talent. The two disciplined used to be further entwined, with some tracks -
such as Brandon - even playing host to their own cycle speedway sides alongside
their bigger, methanol-powered brothers, but this has fallen away in
recent years, to the benefit of neither.
One advantage cycle
speedway will always have over regular speedway is its ability to penetrate the
inner cities. A few longstanding tracks aside, our version of the sport has
retreated to the suburbs and the provinces, but cycle speedway retains clubs in
the major cities, including London (long-since dead for speedway, unlikely ever
to grace the inside of the M25 again), Birmingham, Manchester, and Edinburgh,
but also Norwich, Bristol, Southampton, Exeter, and Hull. There are also cycle
speedway teams still operating in areas where speedway has lost its foothold,
such as South Wales, West Yorkshire, and Oxford.
Another advantage
that pedal-powered racing has is its inclusivity and relative cheapness.
Kids as young as 6 or 7 can start riding, and
sometimes competitively, without too much travel or financial outlay on
the part of their parents. And with the sport running at an amateur level, the
vast majority of its events are free to watch, and often get big crowds -
the British Finals at Coventry
this year attracted over 1000 fans for its August Bank Holiday climax!
Some speedway clubs
have close links with their local cycle speedway sides - I've attended meetings
at Birmingham and Coventry this season where the local cycle speedway clubs
have publicised their events and joining opportunities - but there is so much
more that could be done, both on an ad
hoc local level, and on an organised team-up with the BSPA. The advantages
to both sides are obvious. The cycle speedway teams would gain access to a new
stream of fans and sponsors, and a link-up with their bigger brothers (perhaps
accompanied by a re-branding, in some cases) would also open the door to
increased media opportunities. The speedway clubs would also be able to tap
into new fans, and provide a free alternative to lapsed fans who could then be
tempted back to the sport they fell out of love with/could no longer afford to
go to. It would also establish a "grass roots" element for those
clubs who are lacking such a thing, with the accompanying funding and talent
opportunities that may provide.
More importantly,
the existence of cycle speedway teams in towns and cities that no longer have
their own speedway tracks, and the relative ease and affordability of
establishing further tracks in other towns, provides a testing ground, and
access to local communities in a "safe" way, that may well lead to
opportunities for new motor speedway tracks in those towns down the line. Far
better to expand from cycle speedway, with its grassroots, community aspect
into the noisy, smelly version of the sport than simply appear with the latter,
no? And even if that's a pipe dream, simply having a cycle speedway presence
(linked to, and with advertising for the nearest, if somewhat distant, speedway
track) can do no harm in attracting new fans and sponsors to the senior
discipline.
There is little to
lose from pursuing a link, and everything to gain. How satisfying it would be
to find a John Harrhy (Coventry
speedway legend who learned his racing trade on a pushbike) again! How
refreshing it would be to spend a Sunday afternoon watching the Swindon Robins
Cycle Speedway team in-between gaps in fixtures at the Abbey Stadium! And
imagine how different to a failed radio DJ droning on about nothing important
it would be to watch some cycle speedway on the centre green in-between races
at your local track! The opportunities are bountiful...
ITEM: It used to be a staple of British speedway that touring
teams - the Swedish champions or a Soviet test side, perhaps - would open the
British season with a series of challenge matches up and down the country. In a
scene starved of exotic foreign action, except for the odd and strange meeting
on Screensport, it was a chance for the British & National League teams to
blow out the cobwebs against unfamiliar opposition, who would attract local
fans eager for a slice of the unknown. The proper result - a plucky display by
the visitors but a comfortable home win nonetheless - was usually adhered to,
and everybody then went about their respective serious business, whether it be
winning the National League (of old) or taking on Hungary,
Yugoslavia, and Italy in a
World Team Cup qualifying round.
There'll be a
return, of sorts, to this kind of pre-season action in 2014 when Peterborough play host to Zielona Gora (a "Mickey
Mouse club" due to their emblem, rather than one like Birmingham)
and one other Polish EkstraLiga side, probably Czestochowa, in a mini-tournament. The Polish
leagues are regarded as heads and shoulders above our own, a fact never more
ably illustrated than by this week's "cost-cutting" announcement,
whereby clubs will "only" be able to pay signing on fees of £40,000,
and be restricted to a paltry £900 a point (although when and whether the
riders get paid is another matter), and this will provide a good opportunity for
us to measure, on track, how we match up. It will also be an opportunity for
the speedway "hipster" to turn out, bedecked in their Indianerna or
MSC Brokstedt scarves, and keen to tell everyone how cheap the beer (real ale,
of course) was that time in Togliatti. We're a broad church, and we welcome
everyone, and it might even tempt some of that elusive group - the
British-based Polish speedway fans - out of their hideyholes, and into our
stadiums.
One thing is
certain - it's better for the fans to see this kind of challenge than a visit
from another Elite League side, who may also end up coming twice in the league,
and as such should be encouraged. I still remember looking at pictures of the
Russians in the Speedway Mail and
thinking how great and mysterious they looked. Yeah, I was a hipster, too.
ITEM: Now that we've reached the end of a season that seemed to go
on far too long, it's time to reflect on a few winners and losers. I'm sure you
could write a full list, with just about everybody involved in the sport in one
camp or another, but I'll restrict it to just a handful of both, and let others
go into more depth about just why the track raker at Wolverhampton had a bad
season (tripping over his rake probably didn't help...)
Winners
Laura Morgan - Laura
Morgan doesn't need me to tell you she's a winner. She's recovered from a huge
blow which would probably have seen others give up on life, and ploughed the
small slice of good fortune she received as a result into doing something she
enjoys. After becoming paralysed in a car accident a few years ago, Morgan used
some of the compensation she received to rescue an ailing Workington and ensure
the sport continues in Cumbria
for a good few years yet. Although the Comets missed out on the Premier League
title, they did make the play-offs, and all at the club must have been pleased
with the ongoing progress of young Brits Kyle Howarth and Ashley Morris, as
well as the steps made by their number one Richard Lawson in the Elite League
for Lakeside. Morgan also found some
pennies to help Edinburgh
out of a financial jam, and will ensure that the Comets can comply with the
airfence regulation for 2014, although the club's fans are well on their way to
helping the Cumbrian side pay for that outlay with some solid fundraising.
Morgan, not rich by any stretch of the imagination but with some disposable
income to be invested in speedway, is
exactly the kind of club owner the sport needs, and to see her have some small
success and, more importantly, enjoy what she's doing at Workington, is
heartwarming and encouraging.
Somerset Rebels - After missing out in the play-off
final last season, the Rebels went one better this year and won the Premier
League title. They also added the Pairs' title and the Knockout Cup to their
trophy cabinet, and staged a very successful televised meeting against the
Edinburgh Monarchs in June. They have long been considered to be in possession
of one of - if not the - best racetracks in the UK, and the club's off-track income
stream, due to a prudently-constructed clubhouse, is a blueprint for the modern
speedway club. Put simply, there is little the Highbridge club are doing that
isn't an example of how to do things in speedway (although I'd be a little more
comfortable with less Australians in their side!). The dream move would be for
them to take a step up into whatever the top league looks like next season,
with local derbies with Swindon and Poole to be savoured, and further
investment in the infrastructure of the club and their stadium to make the Oak
Tree Arena an FIM-standard venue, capable of hosting the biggest events on its
fantastic racing surface. That's for the future, however. For now, Somerset are simply a good
news story that goes on and on and on...
Tai Woffinden - You
may have missed it, but Woffinden had a pretty good year. He finally won the
British Final (despite having home track advantage for the last five seasons!)
and won a small thing out in Torun.
What's it called again? Oh, yeah, the WORLD CHAMPIONSHIP. Aside from those very
considerable achievements, Woffinden did two very important, and very
different, things this year. Firstly, he raised a massive amount of money for
Cancer Research, in honour of his much-missed father Rob, who died of cancer in
2010. And he also turned around public opinion of him from a spoiled brat
Australian (who happened to be born in the UK) to a mature, serious, dedicated
Brit, worthy of leading our challenge on the world stage. There's still a few
people to be convinced, but after the year Woffinden has had, it won't be long
- if he keeps this up - until he's truly on top of the world.
Kent Kings
- Despite a less-than-ideal racenight and tapes-up time of Monday at 6.30,
the return of league speedway to Kent was embraced by the people of
Sittingbourne. Huge numbers turned out to their early meetings and,
despite their lack of success on track in those first few faltering steps,
crowds held up encouragingly throughout the season. A team of south-east lads
(and one Yorkshire hairdresser) were taken to
the hearts of the local fans, and Steve Boxall repaid their support by winning
the National League Riders' Championship at Rye House in September. If that
unwieldy start-time can be overcome, there's no reason Kent can't
progress up the leagues, with a stadium and fanbase that would sustain a higher
level of racing...
Losers
Kent Kings - The
one thing that King's fans have been very vocal about is how great it has been
to have a Kent
team to watch again. Many of them hadn't attended speedway since the closure of
Canterbury in
1987, or Crayford some years before, although some of them had been regulars at
Iwade's forays into Conference League racing. However, recent signs point to
the Kings becoming nothing more than a feeder team to the Rye House Rockets,
with whom they share a co-promoter and team manager. This has led to the
resignation of some vital volunteers from the Kings' organisation, and it must
be said that the club is lesser for that. Quite where they go from here - and
with the Rye House style of doing business very much a "shut down for the
winter" approach, it's all gone quiet - is anyone's guess. Fingers crossed
it all works out for the best.
Sheffield Tigers - Running a club to a tight budget
is to be applauded but also seems a recipe for failure in modern speedway. Neil
Machin, at the Tigers' helm for over two decades - has been unwilling to risk
the future of the club by overspending, and has been rewarded by some risible
league placings in the past few years. It doesn't help that they've largely got
it wrong in their rider choices, even allowing for the budget, and have been
hampered by some very unfortunate injuries. Enough is enough, and with only a
woeful Glasgow preventing Sheffield from finishing bottom this season (they also
finished in the same 12th place last year), and with the prospect of an outlay
on an airfence that may also necessitate further expense to install, Machin has
put the club up for sale. The Tigers were lost to the sport for three seasons
before, and it would be unthinkable that it would happen again, especially with
city-centre tracks in large cities becoming an endangered species in speedway.
Nothing seems to be going right in South Yorkshire.
Let's hope that changes pretty fast.
Stoke Potters -
Another club with an illustrious past, the Potters celebrated 40 years of
speedway at the Chesterton stadium this summer, but seldom can they have had a
worse year. Rock bottom in the National League for the entire season, and
unable to find success home or away in the league until the end of August, they
were unable to complete their fixtures, with consequences for that still be
decided. I visited Stoke for the first time in over 20 years for the National
League Fours this summer, and it's fair to say that the stadium hasn't changed
much, looking older than its 40 years, and very much in need of some
TLC. However, with crowds dwindling and the current promoters doing everything
they can just to keep speedway running in the Potteries,
it's hard to see how this might happen. I'd settle for a stronger Potters'
team, and a full set of completed fixtures, and damn the surroundings. I'm not
sure there are many like me, however.
The Elite League -
If the promoters put the EL out of its misery at the AGM later this month (and
I always preferred British League, anyway) there will be few outside of Dorset
who will complain. It's been a dreadful year for the UK's top competition,
marked by absent riders, dreadful injuries, dodgy call-offs, and a moribund
ending enjoyed by Pirates alone. A new start would at least wash some of the
stink of the EL off the sport, and enable us to start afresh, but even if they
don't decide to go down that route there simply needs to be something done to
restore public confidence in the competition. The current EL has a lop-sided
fixture list, just 14 home meetings in a 30-week season, and no supplementary
competitions for the 90% of teams that miss out of the title. Change or die,
either is desirable, but we simply cannot stay the same!
ITEM: There's not much news from this week's pre-AGM, even in the
form of rumours, but something that did leak out - at least to my sensitive
ears - is that they're playing a waiting game with Sky, perhaps to the
detriment of sorting out the things that need fixing, whether we have TV or
not. About 25% of what I hear turns out not to be true, so I dearly hope that
this isn't the case, and that they've ploughed on assuming the worst, setting
their stall out for a Sky-less 2014, and if the wreck and ruin of the modern
era does decide to dirty its feet on our doormat it will be a bonus, to be
invested wisely.
The negotiations
with Sky are carried out by Swindon co-owner Terry Russell, acting apart from
his media rights' firm GoSpeed (which used to hold the exclusive rights to
British speedway on TV, to be sold onto the highest - or only - bidder), and
just as the contract was about to expire he swanned off on holiday. Now he's
back, and eager to talk, but the man he needs to speak to has - you guessed it
- gone on holiday. All this has put the talks back when they really need to be
sorted, one way or another. I'm led to believe there is a Plan B, but that
this has been put on the back burner (not to the satisfaction of all
parties) in favour of pursuing the dirty great whore that is Sky.
Television exposure
is desirable but not essential. It can often work as much against you as in
your favour, and with the present set-up with Sky bringing little in terms of
cross-promotion, even on their 24-hour sports news channel, there seems to be
little to gain in terms of exposure. A far better strategy would be to embrace
social media, especially YouTube, and give up the (not inconsiderable) TV fees
in favour of gaining new and lasting fans attracted by seeing top action on their
mobiles, iPads, laptops, and home PCs. The current deal signed by the likes of
Re-Run and CleanCut, who film all the
action at our local tracks, specifically prohibits this, which would be funny
if it wasn't so retarded.
We live in an era
of increasing choice. It gets harder every day to get noticed above the white
noise of so much entertainment, and
you have to be smart and find new ways of doing it. Placing everything you have
on one anachronistic model is short-sighted and dangerous, and will result in
speedway getting lost in an ever-growing shuffle. There are people attending
tracks up and down the country every week who work in new media, and have ideas
that could benefit the sport far more than holding out for Mr Murdoch's
largesse ever could. The question is not how can we afford to go without Sky,
it's how can we afford to ignore what's in front of our faces?
ITEM: So they announced the Grand Prix Series wild cards and I
couldn't have been more wrong about the fourth recipient. Not that I didn't
name all four names in my rundown two weeks ago of just who might get one, but
that I never dreamed in a million years that they'd go for two Swedes, despite
there being two Swedish grands prix on the calendar. To gift places to both
Andreas Jonsson and Fredrik Lindgren is understandable only in that there's so
little to choose between them. To include both at the expense of another, more
interesting and less-familiar face seems silly. Still, it's BSI's money that
keeps the Big Top up and it's they who choose the clowns that perform, only
this time they've chosen some really boring clowns.
Far more
interesting is the decision to take the Latvian GP to Riga
rather than Daugavpils.
The track at Riga,
if you can call it that, is rudimentary but, of course, they build tracks from
scratch several times a year on the GP circuit. Riga
has the advantage of being the capital city, with visitors to Latvia flying into the city's
airport regardless of their destination, and with sufficient infrastructure to
host the thousands of fans that they're no doubt hoping will visit. What Riga doesn't
have is a speedway pedigree, and this is a further slap in the face for a
Latvian speedway scene already slapped by being forced to qualify for the 2014
SWC, despite finishing above Sweden
and TeamGB in the standings. "It's not how you do, it's who you are"
seems to be the overarching message coming from BSI and the FIM these
days...
ITEM: Politically, for me at least, profit is a dirty word. But I'm
not so naive as to expect everybody
to do what they do for the good of mankind (or at least to keep the wolf from
the door), and we live in a capitalist society that rewards the entrepreneur.
That is unless you invest your money in speedway, in which case profit is not a
dirty word, it's an almost impossible word! Not for nothing is the old joke,
"How do you become a millionaire in speedway? Start with two
million!", rolled out every time a club changes hands, another prospective
promoter with burnt fingers and crushed dreams.
But should it be
this way? Shouldn't it be possible to make a profit from running what is,
essentially, an entertainment venue? Of course it should, and the sport hasn't
helped itself over the years by chasing after ever more elusive
"stars" and allowing a few rich promoters to create an arms race, the
like of which has destroyed top-level football and is unsustainable in British
speedway. There is a fear for most promoters of missing out on the
end-of-season play-offs, despite the prize becoming more worthless every year
precisely because of the tactics - legal and not so much - used to get there.
It's widely
accepted that Coventry
ran to a budget this season. As far as I'm aware, they owe no other clubs any
money, and are instead owed money themselves. This had a knock-on effect on the
track - how Mick Horton would have loved to have signed Thomas H Jonasson, Greg
Hancock, and Przemyslaw Pawlicki (the latter costing £10,000 for only a
handful of meetings before he was discarded) to save his flagging season! - but
the club are in good financial shape as a result. Matt Ford may have complained
last season that Poole lost money for the first time in years (although I would
like to examine his books, particularly the dividends paid to promoters), but
he could well have made a healthy profit this season if he'd accepted that,
sometimes, it's not your year. In spending big - whether you can afford it or
not - you make everyone else spend big, and the cycle continues.
The authorities
need to rule this with an iron hand. There needs to be a budget accepted by all
clubs, and rigorously adhered to, with points penalties if broken. Only then
can existing clubs finish the season in something approaching rude health and -
far more importantly - can we attract new promoters, with new cash and fresh
ideas, into the sport. Why should I take my million pounds and enter a sport I
have no chance of succeeding in because no-one can stick to their budget?
Exactly. Teams need to accept that they are in a league of ten - or thirteen,
or eight - and that without the other teams providing competition (and healthy
competition, ideally) they have nothing to entertain their fans with, no matter
how much money they spend.
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