Another Fruitless Night On Our Travels

REPORT Sunday 8th July 2018, 10:34pm

by Graham Muncie

  Edinburgh Monarchs

It was another fruitless and frustrating evening on the road for the Staggs Bar Monarchs as they fell 53-37 to Scunthorpe at the Eddie Wright Raceway.

As has been the case often on the road this season it was a lack of heat winners that was to be the Monarchs undoing with only 4 heat wins all night.

Unusually it was at the top end where the Armadale men struggled with the so far brilliant Ricky Wells and Erik Riss only managing 13 points and 1 heat win between them.

The offshoot of this was the solid scoring of the rest of the septet with Josh Pickering in particular continuing to impress since moving into the main body of the team with a 8 point score.

The young Aussie saying after 'It wasn't a bad night for me personally but it's a frustrating one for the team. I'm happy enough with my performance even though I felt I should have won heat 10 and in heat 15 I just got pushed out but all in all it was ok. It's a frustrating one for the team as with no offense to Scunthorpe they weren't exceptional but we let them off. It's annoying that we are not all firing, Ricky and Erik have been amazing all season and we haven't backed them up then tonight the rest of us do ok and they are off it a little, that's speedway I guess though and we will go again at Redcar on Thursday.''

The Monarchs dug themselves an early hole they could not get out of with Scunthorpe choosing their guest riders wisely in Rory Schlein and Aaron Summers who both were paid for at least 11 points. This top end strength coupled with star of the show for the Scorpions Josh Auty who raced to a 6 ride paid maximum meant the home men built up an 8 point lead by heat 6. The Monarchs did hold the tie for a few heats keeping the deficit to the same margin with ten races gone. However with the Monarchs main men struggling the home men were able to pull away over the closing heats taking heat advantages in 3 of the remaining 5 races and so it was to be another away match with nothing to show for it for the Monarchs who despite having multiple matches in hand on most of the teams around them in the league know that they need to start turning these into points to climb the league into the playoff positions.

Full Result Details