Berwick Bandits v Edinburgh Monarchs

REPORT Saturday 29th April 2006, 10:00pm

by Mike Hunter

  Edinburgh Monarchs

There must be something about Saturday speedway that decrees it must be run on sopping wet tracks.

That's what we encountered at Stoke last week, and sure enough we arrived at Berwick to see surface water lying on heavy dirt.

As a result racing was poor for much of the night, with a couple of exceptions. There were some curious results because the rider from gate 4 often made the start, but overall Berwick carried more strength than us and deserved to win.

Monarchs had five different race winners which is impressive on an away track, though it wasn't a good match for Henrik. He looked pretty uncomfortable all night.

Monarchs had Richie Dennis of Scunthorpe standing in for Sean Stoddart, and the highly rated youngster had one good second place.

Derek Sneddon was our first race winner in heat 2, and he did it again in heat 4 with Rusty backing up in the latter race.

Rusty unfortunately lost a certain win in heat 6 when he suddenly tumbled on the fourth corner of lap 3, and although he almost kept going he finished up on the football pitch.

William Lawson took advantage of his gate 4 outing to win heat 7, and Theo won heat 8 (also off gate 4). At that point we had narrowed the gap to 4 at 22-26.

However the Smethills / Makovsky pair was proving dominant, and they took their third 5-1 in heat 9. Matthew was on gate 4 in heat 10, and yes - he won from there, after a messy first corner which saw Meldrum fall and Lawson impeded. It should have been stopped but we did come out of it with a 4-2.

The power of gate 4 sent Danny Warwick to the front in heat 11, and this resulted in a good race as Pijper and Bergstrom queued up behind. Bergstrom passed both the rider in front of him before Pijper slipped past Warwick.

What did we say about gate 4? In heat 12 it was Branney's turn to race ahead from the favoured start, and he stayed there with Smethills backing.

This gave us a TR chance in heat 13, quite handy as Rusty was on?. gate 4! He duly won, and with Henrik hanging on to third this time we scored a 7-2.

At that point we departed from gate 4 winners as William and Derek did very well to head Makovsky. This was a good race with Berwick's Czech getting round Derek but not managing to catch William.

Heat 15 was an easy home 5-1 (Berwick had gate 4) leaving us 9 adrift at the end.

Full Result Details