History in the making?

So it seems that the first race of the 2021 Championship will be between Leicester Lions and the FTS Bandits.

Last week’s publication of the much anticipated fixture list revealed that opening night, May 1, sees Redcar visit the east Midlands while Scunthorpe set sail for the Stad de Shielfield.

With both clubs advertising a 7pm start time it will all come down to who between Mr Barrie and his Rat Eye counterpart gets the introductory banter over quickest.

On such small margins history is made.

Eastbourne also stages a meeting on opening night but with the Championship of Sussex not due at the tapes until 7.30 it would take parades of Soviet era proportions at Shielfield and Beaumont Leys for them to claim the kudos.

Hopefully it’s little Billy that bumps them through his posh new gate and up to the tapes first. Winner of heat one sets a new track record. However, it might be worth putting the man with the golden larynx on two minutes … just in case.

An intriguing footnote to the publication of the fixtures was that a sub-committee consisting of Poole’s Danny Ford, Graeme Campbell at Edinburgh and Bandits’ co-owner Jamie Courtney will look into the logistics of streaming a number of Championship fixtures. All three have positive previous with efforts to breathe new life into the old sport.

No info on whether it would be live, delayed, free, pay-to-view or with chips via Deliveroo but a sign of how the times they keep a-changing.

Often when people put digit to keypad to bemoan falling attendances they will ask: “Where did all the fans go?” In many cases the answer is “nowhere” but nowadays they choose to watch from home.

Back in the day the only way to watch sport was to travel and pay at the turnstile. Days long gone. Never to return. The world has moved on and Gary Flint setting his Bandits beanie alight will not bring the crowds flocking back – no matter how well it reportedly worked for Johnnie Hoskins and those other “legendary” promoters of yore.

With the satellite TV revolution came a realisation that sport shifted dishes. Football, cricket and rugby led the way for subscribers but with hours of airtime still to fill – especially in the summer –  sports such as speedway enjoyed a brief snuffle in the event rights’ trough.

But the desire to continually line the pockets of millionaire footballers, cricketers and Formula 1 tax exiles meant that the riches briefly available to non-mainstream sports dried up, leaving them to find alternative revenue from new digital media … such as streaming.

Once upon a time I thought that “streamers” were a bizarre group of country and western “ultras” who spent weekends dressed as Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, full-contact line-dancing to the death.

Turns out that for many it is the only way forward for sports such as speedway. But as with so much of new technology there is no definitive answer to the conundrum of how to, in the vernacular “monetise” streaming.

There is plenty of evidence of a sizeable audience of couch-based fans but much less that they are willing to pay the going rate to do so. Perhaps Berwick’s pay-what-it-was-worth approach to the British under-21 Final stream is the answer.

We are not alone in trying to tap into this potential for new revenue. Rugby League is among the sports looking to find the golden egg and many of their second and third tier clubs have attendances on a par with speedway. Hunslet director Damian Irvine, a former chairman of Aussie side Cronulla warned in an interview for the Everythingrugbyleague website: “Streaming is by no means the be-all-and-end-all.”

Irvine quotes the experience of football which has been streaming games via iFollow during the Covid epidemic. Bradford City – a club with 9,000 season ticket holders, tempted just over 800 subscribers for each of the first two games. Bolton Wanderers fared better with 1800 and Grimsby Town just over 1000 for the tenner a head matches. He warned: “It brings a little bit in but most clubs at Championship and League one would profit more from their coffee and tea bar at a game with spectators than they would from streaming. You can’t be fantastical.”

However, every brilliant idea starts with a moment of inspiration. We await the findings of the Streaming Trio with bated breath.

All of which dragged me into the 21^st Century at the end of the week which had seen me going more than a little retro.

I was ready to fire up the de Lorean, slap A Kiss in the Dreamhouse into the eight-track, ponder the plot twists of Triangle, apply to appear on the BBC game show where in the words of Robert Kilroy Silk: “your fate will be in each other’s hands as you decide whether to share or shaft”.

Plymouth unveiled Jason Crump and Bjarne Pedersen as their spearhead; England cricketers were being (ill-)judged by home-grown umpires on the sub-continent, live on terrestrial TV; shale laid at Odsal; a bright, new dawn for Scottish rugby fizzled into another false one.

It could have been Mike Gatting facing off with Shakoor Rana in Faisalabad or Phil Crump missing out on a fourth World Final appearance amid the mud of Vetlanda in a farcical 1985 Inter Continental Final which saw him join Kenny Carter, John Davis, Andy Smith and Phil Collins as the five non-qualifiers from a meeting which should never have been staged.

Bradford City Council reportedly spent £3.5 million overhauling Odsal allowing it to become replace Wembley on the World Final roster that year. Still to be declassified government documents allegedly reveal that revamping the stands, terracing and infrastructure in West Yorkshire accounted for £2m of tax-payers mullah – the balance just about covered the expenses for the infield meeting presenter. Sadly, there was nothing left for the monkey.

2020s, 1980s. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme.

1985 was the year that Vodaphone launched Britain’s first mobile phone network,  250,000 miners worked in British pits, 130,000 in steel works, unemployment was 11.9 per cent (three million), the average house cost £26,300, 13 per cent owned a home computer.

British speedway was the centre of the universe. Not because it was the best organised, provided the best racing or even had the best brains running it. But because only Britain allowed a professional living to non-domestic riders.

And for the one and only time the speedway World Final was broadcast live on British terrestrial TV. World of Sport trimmed two races off the ITV Seven, postponed the wrestling from Dunstable Baths and told Saint and Greavsie to stop rabbiting to allow the coverage to begin – as soon as Mr Barrie finished his pre-meeting presentations.

Within a couple of months World of Sport had been binned and the one-off World Final was – via a still inexplicable two-day final in Amsterdam and terminally dull excursion to Munich – counting down the days until it was replaced by a Grand Prix series.

It was finally laid to rest at Vojens in 1994. Jason Crump was in the line-up that day but only those with a satellite dish, or a desire to travel to the middle of nowhere, watched on.

He’s due at the Shielfield tapes in August.

That should get you off the couch.

Let’s have a parade …