No Fitba

1974 was the year Exeter Falcons won the British League. The big star was the New Zealander Ivan Mauger. There was also the American Scott Autrey. It’s not very often that a team from our part of the world wins a national title in any sport so Westward Diary, the local ITV news programme, was agog. Every week we were treated to a rather grainy film of bikes whizzing around the track and Ivan Mauger holding his arms aloft. For the uninitiated such as myself it could easily have been the same piece of film shown every time.

Here, in finishing order, were the teams in the top flight in 1974:

Exeter Falcons; Belle Vue Aces; Ipswich Witches; Sheffield Tigers; King's Lynn Stars; Newport; Halifax Dukes; Wimbledon Dons; Hackney Hawks; Leicester Lions; Wolverhampton Wolves; Swindon Robins; Cradley United; Poole Pirates; Coventry Bees; Hull Vikings; Oxford Rebels.

And the second tier:

Birmingham Brummies; Eastbourne Eagles; Boston Barracudas; Workington Comets; Crewe Kings; Teesside Tigers; Bradford Barons; Peterborough Panthers; Coatbridge Tigers; Canterbury Crusaders; Berwick Bandits; Barrow Bombers; Stoke Potters; Ellesmere Port Gunners; Long Eaton Archers; Rye House Rockets; Scunthorpe Saints; Sunderland Gladiators; Weymouth Wizards.

Alliteration abounds with several truly terrible names and an occasional nod in the direction of the local football team. Forty-five years later speedway has three divisions – premiership, championship and development – consisting of seven, eleven and eight teams respectively. That’s a decline from a total of thirty-six in 1974 to twenty-six this season with two of the teams being the second strings of Belle Vue and Leicester. Fifteen of the 1974 teams are still riding, twenty-one have gone (including the mighty Falcons) and nine are new.

Long-established Poole, Swindon, Wolverhampton, Ipswich, Belle Vue, King’s Lynn and Peterborough made up the premiership. You wonder if those are the teams which mean the most to the greatest number of people and have done for a while. Lower down Leicester, Berwick, Sheffield, Scunthorpe, Eastbourne, Birmingham, Cradley and Stoke still have speedway teams although the names have changed in a few cases.

I suspect the story of what has happened to the land on which speedway was raced is every bit as important as the sport’s declining popularity. No doubt too the two are linked.

It goes without saying that when the Stranraer Observer talks about sport that doesn't include so-called "country sports" such as the one that's in the news a great deal today, because it's the day after the traditional Boxing Day Hunts. Foxhunting is supposed to be illegal but it seems you are far more likely to be fined for being homeless than for killing a fox. Among the images captured from yesterday is a film of Sheffield's Hunt Saboteurs taking refuge in their van while a hunt member repeatedly bangs the corpse of a young fox against the windows while shouting threats and abuse. Meanwhile the Daily Telegraph includes, on it front page, what its editor obviously feels is a cute photograph of a wee child blowing a horn to summon the start of a hunt. We can probably take it as read that this is the beginning of a campaign to overturn the ban, which doesn't appear to be being policed anyway.

A more acceptable tradition of the day is football, except here in the South West of Scotland there wasn't any yesterday because neither the Sooth nor the SPFL second, third and fourth tiers arranged any fixtures. Only the Premier League had a full set of games, and the smiling winners in the Edinburgh derby were Hibernian. At this rate Daniel Stendel of Hearts is going to set new records for being "under pressure" according to Sportscene.

Hey! This thread is supposed to be about other sports. Remember? Aye, sorry about that. Leeds Rhinos gave a sign that they are putting last season's miseries behind them by giving Wakefield Trinity a festive trouncing. Other than that 26 December was a bit of a sporting desert. There was some Test cricket and a few Welsh Rugby Union games but anyone who is interested in cricket or RU will know the details already so there's no point in droning on about them here.

There was no skiing in Glencoe either. A fire in the wee small hours of Christmas morning destroyed the base restaurant and cut off all power to the resort. Police are looking for a character who was seen at the time wearing a red coat and driving a sleigh. He is believed to have set fire to the building by delivering a suspect package which looked very much like a Lynx after shave set but was actually an explosive device.

Boring!

On our side of the pond Naeb'dy cares about American sport, or, as they insist on saying over there, sports. This means that no matter how many times we are given information and hype on the subjects we are not interested in basketball, baseball and American football. They are all seem dull to me and the players are obscenely overpaid and over-publicised.

The Super Bowl? Naeb'dy cares. I don't want to know who won and certainly have less than no interest in who mimed at half time or what they wore to do so. The same goes for basketball. With all due respect to his daughter and to the other people killed in the helicopter accident last week, Kobe Bryant would probably still have been in prison for rape were it not for the fact that he was wealthy enough to pay off his accuser.

Baseball is incomprehensible to me. It seems to be a crazy version of rounders. The fans obviously love it and it seems to create a good atmosphere but I don't have a clue about the rules. Still, Americans (and some Scots) probably feel the same way about cricket, so if the people of the USA love their baseball than fair play to them, but that's no reason to bore the rest of us by telling us who's winning the World Series, because we don't care.

Then there's ice hockey. It's mad. I have been to a game and it was impossible to follow because the players continually jumped in and out of the playing arena and the puck is so tiny that unless you're watching on television it's invisible. It's like some insane ballet in which big men in crash helmets all rush towards each other, wave sticks around and start smashing each other against the fence. Then, after 20 minutes of nonsense, there's another 20 minutes of hot dog eating before they come back, go through the same rituals again, go off again while the crowd eat yet more sausage and the finally there's another 20 minutes of apparently aimless violence.

To be fair, the game I saw didn't take place in the USA but in Sweden. It attracted the very dregs of Växjö, who were largely drunk and aggressive and made Sieg Heil salutes while singing the Swedish national anthem. We left after the second 20 minutes, partly through fear and alienation but mostly because of sheer boredom. It was mince.

In England, Wales, France and, crazily, Canada the Rugby League season has begun. Fixtures like Castleford v Toronto can fairly be described as absurd and a waste of the Earth's resources. If the Canadians and Americans can play in their own soccer league I see no reason why they can't do likewise re Rugby League. I actually like the game far more than its 15-a-side equivalent but it sold its soul to Rupert Murdoch long ago. The team strips are a horrible parody of what they traditionally looked like and are swathed in advertising from top to bottom, while the silly contrived titles like Warriors, Bears, Rhinos &c are embarrassing. Warrington Wolves is the daftest of all; Wolverhampton Wanderers are the Wolves and there's no place for any more. Warrington have always been the Wire and I'm sure that to the fan-in-the-street they are still the Wire to this very day.

Sheer lack of integrity has been demonstrated by Catalans Dragons' signing of Israel Fulau, who was exiled from the game in Australia because of his unapologetic homophobia. Should the Catalans be drawn against Halifax then Fax's gay prop forward Keegan Hirst will be expected to take the field and play against a team, one of whose members has openly (and, to be fair, honestly) said that in his opinion all gays are going to go to Hell. Fans who were glad to see the back of the unpleasant Ben Barba will mostly be less than thrilled to see Fulau turning out in the Super League.

Rugby Union's 6 Nations tournament has begun, and when it finishes Italy will be placed last, Scotland 5th and other 4 spots will be competed for by France, Ireland, England and Wales. Scotland's "almost won but didn't quite make it" defeat on Saturday was 100% Scottish. No matter what the sport, Scotland will always fail. Maybe, together with the rain, it's the price we have to pay for living in the most attractive and least right wing of the six nations that take part.

Rugby Union started to officially embrace professionalism around the time of that television deal and, looking back, you're inclined to ask if either sport realised what that might entail. It may have been a case of one group of people working through (a), (b) and (c) as possibilities whilst another were already on (d), (e) and (f).

As a football follower, living in an area where there's a greater level of interest in Rugby Union than in many other parts, I vaguely thought the game would become semi-professional at its higher levels with just a small number of professionals who were paid no more than third and fourth division footballers. The international game was big but the club game was modest. Perhaps it would be the Welsh clubs that paid the most. You couldn't imagine a club like Exeter even matching a Southern League football club.

Maybe that's how some in the sport itself saw it; who knows what Rugby League expected to happen. But it must have become soon apparent to some Union people that, through its social standing and associated business networks, the game had access to serious amounts of money. Suddenly there were clubs who could go about their business in a fashion akin to the upper echelons of English football (albeit not the very top) as opposed to Rugby League's model that was more in line with the lower divisions of the Football League. And, once the process had started, clubs could metamorphise from being run by committee to falling under the control and ownership of wealthy individuals.

Who'd have predicted that other than the sort of mind who was always several steps ahead when they sold off the utilities and the council houses? Rugby League never stood a chance. Union was soon blocking the exits from the M62 on to the M1, A1(M) and M6. The game's onward march has even impinged on football in places. A generation ago Exeter had a rugby team playing at a speedway track. The idea of their turnover and support reaching a fraction of Plymouth Argyle's would have been fanciful. You would also have questioned the whole idea of Wasps even being a secondary tenant at the stadium in Coventry. Football, as it happens, has largely been able to carry on regardless; it's been different for Rugby League.

Now here's another thing you might not have predicted when Union became professional: the success and appeal of the Irish provinces. They've almost tapped into the place that was envisioned with all that talk of English football clubs moving to Belfast or Dublin. Not quite on that scale - and the spectators may be a different group - but it's big and Limerick has been pulled in as well. Having a 26,000 capacity rugby ground in the city helps there.

Rugby certainly has a curious place in Irish society and it appears to have broken away from the Garrison Game image. I'm imagining it still has a slightly narrower appeal in Belfast and Dublin than it does in Munster. But, nonetheless, pretty mainstream. Who isn't interested now?

Yet I'm still curious how an interest in rugby sits with soccer and GAA. I guess there's a follower who likes the big-time version of all three. I've encountered people like that in Devon and Somerset over the years; a genuine interest in top-flight sport across the codes with no concern with what lies below. I guess you'd call this a horizontal interest as opposed to vertical. The only conclusion about this group in Ireland might be that they'll have no interest in the League of Ireland. That must appear rather poor fare alongside all the other riches although I rather like it myself.

Any GAA-rugby crossover intrigues me. On the surface I can visualise GAA enthusiasts being far more interested in Liverpool and Manchester United than the Six Nations. Yet the sports are massive in Munster with Cork City's 3,000-odd supporters (highly respectable by League of Ireland standards) appearing insignificant by comparison. Are the rugby and GAA communities exclusive of each other or is there an easy-going overlap? It's a particularly intriguing question given Munster's history.

And, as I've seen described elsewhere, several of those GAA stadiums are "big beasts". According to Wikipedia: Croke Park 82,000; Limerick, Thurles, Cork and Killarney 40,000 plus. Even Casement Park in Belfast is considerably larger than Windsor Park.

Em has been in the USA for so long he doesn't know that there is promotion and relegation in cricket's County Championship, or that nobody is interested in the table at all. These days one-day cricket and Test matches bring in crowds; the County Championship is a very poor relation. If you were to ask someone in the street, even in Taunton, there's a chance they might have no idea whether Somerset are in the First or Second Division. I certainly don't know. All I know about county cricket in the 21st century is that Derbyshire are always bad.

Mention of the League of Ireland conjures up comparisons with the Scottish League. I expect Cork City would be a very respectable club in the SPFL. It's shame that the Irish immigrants who formed Hibernian, Celtic and at least 20 other football clubs in the 19th century didn't start GAA clubs as well. Not only would Gaelic football and hurling have added much to the Scottish sporting scene but it would have been a game in which Scotland might have realistically claimed to have the second best national side in the world.