Bryn shares this latest update from Island Speedway and the Wight Warriors team. Ed
Indeed the moment we’ve been waiting for arrives tonight (Thursday) at the Andrew Younie Smallbrook Stadium when the tapes rise at 7pm on the first heat of our clash with the Stoke Potters in what is our first home Travel Plus National League fixture of the season.
Yes, our first home league match since Barry Bishop and Martin Widman took the bold decision to bring the ultra-exciting sport of speedway back to the Isle of Wight.
And team manager Neil Vatcher and his seven man Wightlink Islanders team are determined to start their home league campaign with a victory, well and truly potting the Potters in the process!
A solid outfit
Stoke arrive on the Island like ourselves in not having had a home league match so far and having lost their two away matches at King’s Lynn last month. As well as indicating that they might well have designs on registering a victory of their own going down by 48-41 at Rye House in a last heat decider on Monday, conceding a last heat 5-1 to the Raiders having gone into that race trailing by just three points with the home side leading 43-40.
They are a solid outfit from top to bottom as proven by the fact that their lowest scorer at Rye House was reserve Lewis Millar with three and their highest scorer No.1 Ben Wilson with nine.
Wilson, a 30 year old Yorkshireman will certainly be one we’ll have to be wary of tonight as he’ll revel in the wide bends of our circuit having moved back to Stoke during winter after riding for Scunthorpe last year.
Keep it in the family
Chris Widman will no doubt be keep to ‘put one over his dad’ tonight, his dad being none other than our own co-promoter Martin Widman and a third rider amongst their septet, Tony Atkin, has well and truly laid to rest any notion that you have to be young to consistently score points at league level
Tony is a mere fifty years of age, having been born in Wrexham, North Wales on the 8th April in 1966 and is still banging in high scores for our visitors for whom he made his debut back in 1986.
Stoke will certainly be no pushovers, they’ll want to win too but the Wightlink Warriors are determined that it’ll be them who emerge with the league points come the end of heat 15.
Fun galore off track
Off track there’s fun galore planned with all manner of competitions and prizes to go to the winners so the message is come on down to Ashey Road for a night of thrills, spills, fun – a great night out for young and old and, remembers kids with a paying adult come in FREE!
For full details of admission prices and much, much more, go to our official Website.
What’s needed
We’ve 24 points to make up on 7th June to progress to Next Round of the KO Cup.
With our team manager Neil Vatcher away on British Youth Championship duty, co-promoter Barry Bishop put another of his many hats on to act as our team manager in the first leg of our KO Cup first round tie at the home of the still unbeaten (they drew 45-45 in a league match at Birmingham last night) Kent Kings side.
We went there to win of course but, if we couldn’t manage that, ‘plan b’ was to keep the match score as close as possible come the end of the away leg and we seemed to be achieving that when we trailed by just six points at 24-18 after seven heats.
Unfortunately though we couldn’t resist what appeared to be a homesters surge over the course of the final eight heats which left the final scoreline reading Kent 57 Wightlink Warriors 33 leaving us with 24 points to make up when we clash in the second leg at Ashey Road on 7th June.
Barry Bishop though maintains and acts as leader of the positive vibes that continue to emanate from the Wightlink Warriors merely commenting,
“Had we had a better run of the green in not having a couple of slide offs when in point scoring positions and likewise engine problems, the scoreline would have been a lot kinder to us.”
OUR SCORERS: James Cockle 8, Mark Baseby 6, Kelsey Dugard 5+2, Benji Compton 5, Lee Smart 5, Tyler Govier 3, Matt Saul 1.
