REFRESHED!

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Ooooh, this is nice – a bright, refreshed club website on which to post our weblogs!

We might not be seeing any live speedway yet, but while we impatiently take our places in the queue for returning to life as we knew it, your club is still providing the best and brightest off-track entertainment, as evidenced by this fine new look.

Me likey!

Later this week it’s that time of the month again…..

I continue to live in hope each time that I’ll collect a dividend from my ‘5-1’ investment.   This nice little earner, administered for the promotion by the Supporters Club, continues to pump much-needed finance into the club’s funding.

If you don’t already have a number, why not?      The cause is a good one, and the prizes are impressive.   Even during lockdown, we could all do with a bonus monkey……

Being under house arrest in Scotland, where I’m still being treated as an endangered species, I’m running a bit behind English-minded folk as to when I’ll be allowed out to play again – but it’ll happen, and as the song nearly says, there’ll be love and laughter, plus bluebirds over the white cliffs of Dunstanburgh – just you wait and see…..

I visited those cliffs once, back in the Berrington Lough days.       There was some event – a fayre or a fete – one Saturday I was involved in opening near Wooler, and I came down early and had a poke about the area.

I don’t know exactly where it was, but I remember pulling into a pub, maybe a hotel, for lunch.   It wasn’t great – I won’t say the service was bad, but you could get a drink quicker in the Betty Ford Clinic.

Although I never really mind bad service in a restaurant.  It makes me feel better about not leaving a tip……

Moving on, I can’t see that any professional sport is going to prosper behind closed doors, however valuable the sponsorship might be.

You need the people there, you gotta feel the buzz.    That’s why they have a live audience when taping a scripted TV sitcom – the performers need to have that vibe going.

Players in German football are reporting their re-opening matches felt devoid of any spirit or meaning – one guy said it was like slow-dancing with your sister – if and when Polish speedway returns on the same basis next month I fear it will be like a series of organised practice sessions.

So we will have to wait.   When speedway returns – and return it will – there will be some differences, to be sure.   We are fortunate at Berwick, as Shielfield is a big enough arena to scatter people all around to observe social distancing but with still enough space to get everyone in.

I read somewhere that a young UK rider – not a Bandit — was considering retirement, as this was to be his ‘breakthrough year’ and the plague had ‘ruined things for him’.       Aw, poppet – you thought it had been going to be easy to race speedway?

Look at the case of former Berwick skipper Doug Templeton.     He wanted to race speedway, and fought his way into the Glasgow team in his mid-twenties, only for the Tigers to close down in 1954, just as he was getting going.

Did he decide that was his career ruined?  Nope, Doug waited SIX YEARS before league speedway returned to Scotland and he could land a regular team slot at Edinburgh in 1960, going on to enjoy a long and storied career – including his time leading the Bandits in the early ‘seventies.

So if this teenager reckons that having a six-month pandemic pass through the planet has ruined his career by holding his progress back a few months, let him consider Doug’s six-year devotion to duty.

This plague has messed everyone about, and he might not get his embryo career kick-started until later this year – but if he had been around in the 1950s, he might be facing a six-year delay, not a few months……..

Folks, it’s annoying, it’s inconvenient and at times downright discombobulating – but as George said, all things must pass.

Just you wait and see…..

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Want to disagree with Dick (as so many do?).   He is always happy to hear from interesting people at  dick@crystalfm.co.uk