Plymouth Devils v Edinburgh Monarchs

Looking at the previous week’s match against Workington, Devils’ reserve Sam Simota had scored 14+1 and so he was likely to be a danger man again. So it proved against ourselves when he scored 13+1 and was the match winner for his team.

We could claim the other individual stars in Craig Cook and guest Brady Kurtz, but there wasn’t enough backup and for once our middle pairing did not have a good meeting, conceding two 5-1s together with both Kevin Wolbert and Erik Riss also on the wrong end of 5-1s in their other heats 12 and 14.

Once again starting positions had a greater relevance to the match than they should have done. Gate 4 was the no-hoper this time and each of Kurtz, Wolbert and Cook had it in their first heats, in which they contributed 3 in total as we fell 8-16 behind.

From heat 5 onwards only Simota (3 times) had a heat win for Plymouth and we took the other 8, but we could not get enough advantages.

Sedgmen did feature in a heat 5 5-1 with Kurtz and a heat 8 4-2 with Branford, but we were still 6 down after the latter race.

Cook won heat 9 and Clegg did well to head Todd Kurtz. Wolbert followed up with his only win but Riss was pointless, and it was the same again in heat 11 with Kurtz first and Sedgy off gate 4 last.

The heat results continued to swing with the gates, and while we gained heat advantages through Kurtz and Cook in heat 13 and 15, these were more than nullified by losses in heats 12 and 14.

The final heat effort by our top two gave us a point when we started the night hoping for a better result. However we could not blame it on Sam’s absence (he was in the pits with Branford) but we just didn’t do well enough.