Glasgow Tigers v Edinburgh Monarchs

With limited expectations, we felt we had done reasonably well at home last Friday night and at Berwick on Saturday. With Glasgow going very well at the moment, we hoped we could put up a reasonable show at a track where we have enjoyed so much recent success.

For eight heats we did OK, sitting at 21-27 at that stage, but over the last few heats there were one or two disasters, primarily Ryan?s big pileup.

We dropped 15-9 behind over the first four heats with Aaron our only race winner in heat 2. Matthew picked up an exclusion in heat 3 when he ran into Mitchell Davey.

As at Berwick, gate 1 was pretty poor (both tracks have a too-strong outside line) and we took advantage of that in heat 5 to take a comfortable 5-1 through Ryan and Michal off the outside gates. But we lost it right back again in the next heat when Matthew stopped on his second bike.

Two shared heats followed with Max passing Davey, and Michal impressive in winning heat 8, and things weren?t too bad at that stage. Aaron would have been in heat 8 but did not have his machine ready.

Heat 9 was not a good one for us as we failed to take advantage of gates 2 and 4 even though Ryan and Aaron made the start. They tangled up going for the outside and gifted the advantage to the more cautious Tigers on the inside, and made matters worse with a public show of disagreement after the heat.

We shared heat 10 with Max taking another decent point ahead of Grajczonek, and gave Ryan the TR job in heat 11 even though he was on gate 1. With Michal in front chased by James Grieves, Ryan was throwing everything in to his challenge to try to pass Grieves. It was an exciting heat with Grieves dicing with the dodgy bend two to try to get some drive, then Ryan tried the same thing to improve his position.

He went too wide though and caught the fence with his footrest, flying through the air and landing well down the straight on his back with his bike flying over the fence.

It was spectacular and unpleasant and even the partisan Glasgow announcer was moved to make some favourable comments about Ryan?s great efforts. Thankfully, Ryan seemed to be relatively unscathed though he wasn?t sure what day it was.

The Parkers were both quickly out to check on our fallen star, and after their previous bust-up, Aaron too was very solicitous about Ryan?s well-being.

After that we pretty much just wanted the match over. Three of the last four heats were lost 5-1, but heat 14 was an unexpected 7-2 in our favour with Matthew coming from a long way back to snatch a win on the line.