Lions through to the final

NEWS Saturday 24th September 2022, 9:56pm

by Mike Hunter

  Edinburgh Monarchs

With a late fightback the WTF Monarchs managed to get one point closer to Leicester than in their home leg, going out of the Playoffs at the semi final stage by 73-106 on aggregate.

Team manager John Campbell said "It's been a disappointing weekend for us, we thought we would do better. No excuses though we were not good enough."

Not unusually the bulk of the scoring was done by Sam Masters who won his first four races, and Josh Pickering who was battling from the back as usual. The others chipped in a few points here and there with a trademark heat 14 victory for Paco Castagna, who now jets off to appear in the Czech Golden Helmet tomorrow!

There were a few problems along the way, starting at heat one when Nick Morris's machine reared fiercely at the tapes and threw him off the back. The bike then caught the ever-unlucky Lasse Fredriksen and brought him down as well.

Lasse has pain in his forearm and wrist but is probably not too badly damaged.

Morris was ruled out of the meeting and after taking two rides, Fredriksen withdrew also. It's hard to recall a Monarch who has been the innocent victim so often.

That wasn't our only problem as for the first time in a while Sam admitted that his left shoulder was giving him problems, while Josh and Kye were both struggling with their machinery.

With Sam Masters winning heats one and five, we kept the scores to just a 13-17 deficit, but ran into a bad patch over the next four races - even Josh Pickering lost a heat 9 5-1.

From that point on we rallied a bit and lost no more ground. High point for us was heat 13 with Sam taking his fourth win and Josh blasting from the back to give us a 5-1.

We also took a 4-2 from heat 14 through Castagna and Hook against the Thompson twins, then lost the final heat in which Josh managed to head Richie Worrall, but Sam finally ran out of steam.

So that brings Monarchs' season to a disappointing conclusion, though as memories of this tie fade we will remember some of the good things this team has done.

We have some Dale Devils action in the next fortnight and then our big Farewell event on 15th October.

Full Result Details