Track Talk: Wolverhampton Wolves missed just one piece

That’s been the case at Wolverhampton this season, in my view.

As soon as promoters introduced a rule where each club could only use one rider with an average of eight or above – aimed at distributing top riders around the league – Wolverhampton had to leave out Freddie Lindgren or Jacob Thorssell.

Lindgren was the rider to miss out, but that meant he was lost to British speedway, which made a mockery of the rule.

I’m not saying it was a mistake and, having not spoken to Freddie about it, I don’t know whether he was that keen to return to this country anyway.

But one thing is for sure, you need a big hitter for the crucial races in heats 13 and 15. Look at Jason Doyle at Somerset, look at Robert Lambert and Niels-Kristian Iversen at King’s Lynn.

The difficulty Wolverhampton had that including Lindgren would have left them very weak down at reserve and that, too, can cost teams meetings. It’s such a balancing act and it gives the keyboard experts plenty to debate.

But I do feel Wolverhampton were just one rider short of making the play-offs. Fine margins and all that, they won the league and 2016 and were runners-up last year, so it was always going to be tough to follow that up.

Equally frustrating is that we have no idea at this stage what the league format will be next season, so planning has to be on hold. It’s a challenging time for the sport and many promoters are rightly concerned about tough trading conditions.

In an expensive sport to run, money from commercial ventures isn’t there. The league has no main sponsor and the TV deal is a fraction of the previous Sky Sports income.

Now that’s tough. If only British Speedway had, say, £500,000 in sponsorship to go around the clubs it would be a massive boost. Once again I predict an interesting AGM in November.

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Cradley are facing another uncertain few weeks ahead of decisions on next season.

And club co-promoter Gary Patchett has revealed how they could be faced with a straight choice between a full league season or nothing.

Writing in the programme for Tuesday’s National Trophy final with Mildenhall, Patchett claimed all clubs wanted the Motor Market Heathens in the competition at the AGM when it was announced they couldn’t run a full league season.

But Patchett said: “While we’ve achieved what we set out to at the start of the season I can’t imagine we’ll be allowed back next year, at least in the current format.

“As I’ve said before everyone wants a slice of the Heathens pie, but not at the expense of us winning!”

Heathens have caused a stir with their ‘cherry picking’ of riders from other clubs and Mildenhall promoter Kevin Jolly labelled them ‘Wolves Reserves’ and ‘National League Select’ ahead of Tuesday’s clash.