Pairs triumph for Redcar

REPORT Friday 12th August 2022, 10:19pm

by Mike Hunter

  Edinburgh Monarchs

Redcar Bears were deserved winners of the Championship Pairs at Oxford tonight, defeating Poole in the final. Pirates' Steve Worrall didn't leave the start in the final but as the Bears' pair kept Danny King behind them anyway, there's no doubt the right pair won.

The beaten semi-finalists were Leicester and Glasgow, and it was the Scottish Tigers who had the top man in the meeting in Benjamin Basso.

A lot of the league's leading riders were missing of course, which rather unbalanced quite a few of the heats, and the track preparation team did not solve the problem of what to do with the surface on a very hot day. Early on there was mud, dust and puddles, and towards the end it was mainly dust.

Monarchs' stand-in pair of Kye Thomson and Paco Castagna were not able to raise their game to put in a challenge, and never really recovered from a resounding 7-2 defeat to Leicester in the opening race when Lions' Nick Morris was seen complaining to the referee about the surface.

Our pair did manage to take 5-4 advantages against both Birmingham and Glasgow, before losing 6-3 to Scunthorpe. We were 6 points adrift of second-placed Glasgow in the Group. Paco scored 8 and Kye 7.

Other points of interest were two early wins for Justin Sedgmen, and a good showing from Berwick who very nearly pipped Poole. Home team Oxford had a disastrous evening losing their first three heats by a maximum score.