WWO Fantasy Speedway League 2000
The League is in it second year after the success of the 1999 season, which saw us visiting Eastbourne on a number of occasions, and getting speedway back on the map (in our office anyway).
The final results have been
posted, and as predicted it’s gone to the wire again.
The
Champions are ----Simon Parker’s - Who Needs Dugard with 1847.5 points (well
below Des Brown’s 1891 points scored in 1999) but who knows what might of
happened had he included Martin Dugard’s 347 points?? But his team did include
Joe Screen who has taken Martin’s mantel of No.1 in the Eastbourne league
championship winning team.
Only Nine points behind
were Phil Clarke’s - Crap Like Phil (an anagram I believe), and a shock third
place – rising from sixth in the last week is Sue Garlick’s - Shale
Shifters. Sterling performances from Richard Long and Alan Wishdish – who used
the underhand tactic of professing to
know nothing about speedway at the start of the season – clearly an untruth,
finished in 4th and 6th place respectively, only split by
yours truly.
The rest of the scores
are attached and will be archive on this site for prosperity, but some of the
most notable achievements are;
Andy Taylor managing to
finish in twelfth position, a clear improvement over thirteenth (and last) for
the whole of last season.
Andy Swain who managed to
rescue the worst team selection ever known in the history of the sport, with
some canny transfers mid season (Go Colesy Go). He managed a creditable 15th
after spending 12 weeks at the foot of the table.
Mat Toy for the fastest
fall down the table, at one point I thought he would fall off the bottom, fancy
choosing the worst of the Drmly brothers!! Although picking a team based on how
funny their names are has never been proved to be a good selection method, and
in fact it has proved worse than dividing 45 by 7 and choosing all riders around
a 6.42 average because Mat finished in 23rd place compared to Andy
Swain’s 15th.
I’ll save Idris any
embarrassment by not mentioning that he managed to finish last, which was one
better than last year when he finished 2nd from last – who knows
what will happen next year!!
I have just heard that
Mark Loram has been voted “BBC South” Sports Personality of the year –
taking 63% of the vote, so lets get speedway onto the main programme by visiting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport/hi/english/in_depth/2000/sports_personality/
and get some speedway on prime time TV – vote by the 7th December,
because I think this only creates the short list.
It’s been an excellent
season with a British World Champ, Eastbourne winning the league, speedway on
Channel 4 and even Rob and myself taking part at Kings Lynn (and getting our
pictures into Speedway Star). Next year should be even better with the
possibility of the Long Eaton Invaders making a welcome comeback and the British
Grand Prix being held in the Cardiff Millennium Stadium on Saturday June 9th
– anyone fancy going – Tickets only £19 it’s going to be brilliant with
no chance of a rain off because of the roof. We will be getting back to the
likes of the BIG Wembley finals. Let me know if you interested – discount if
we order more than 20.
Incidentally
the real winning team scored 2348 points, picked by an eight year old!!
The
riders were [with the people who has selected them were;
Peter
Carr (474) [Dorothy],
Alan
Mogridge(401) [-],
Craig
Boyce (307) [-],
Seemond
Stephens (247) [Alan, Heather],
Paul
Smith (240) [Idris, Andy Taylor],
Billy
Hamill (194) [Barry, Neil, Simon, Tom, Heather] replaced by Joe Screen (229)
[Andy Walls, Simon, Des, Tom],
Craig
Taylor (56) [Melvin] replaced by David Walsh (200) [-]