Pointless At Redcar

The Parsons Peebles Monarchs went down meekly 52-40 at Redcar this evening in the SGB Championship.

The Monarchs had travelled south in the hope of picking up some much needed league points but with only Sam Masters and Erik Riss putting up any real resistance against a solid home outfit this was not to be.

Monarch’s co-promoter John Campbell admitted after the match “It was a disappointing night. When you have a team built around 3 top heat leaders when one of them doesn’t perform it’s always going to be a problem. 2 of them did one of them didn’t and that left us no chance. There weren’t a lot of passing opportunities tonight on a nice flat super fast track and a lot of our guys were struggling out the gate so that was that.”

The visitors did make a bright start taking a 4-2 in the first race with captain Sam Masters racing from the tapes and with recent addition Theo Pijper slotting into third it was a promising opening. However this was to be short lived as the Redcar pair took a heat 2 maximum from tapes to flag to put the home men in front and they were never to be headed from then on.

The match was to remain tight over the next few heats till a heat 6 5-1 for the home men blew the match open and the Monarchs were then left chasing their tails.

Further losing heats in heats 8 and 9 meant the Armadale men were now in tactical territory but when Jonas B Andersen headed home the previously unbeaten Erik Riss to nullify this it looked like game over.

In actual fact the spoils were shared over each of the next four heats meaning the visitors did have a chance to stealing what would have been an undeserved point in heat 15 with Masters and Riss who had both only been headed once needing to head home pairing of Andersen and Ben Barker. Barker was quickest from the gate and despite an exciting battle that was that and it was another fruitless night for the Monarchs.