Peterborough Panthers 53 Poole Pirates 38 – Elite League A
Peterborough won their second match of the season; this time over the current league champions and the result heralded the returning Karol Zabik, who opened his season account with a very satisfactory 9 points.
Although early on it looked like Poole would push them hard all the way, it didn’t work out that way with the Panthers supremely back to their best with a convincing second half performance that the Pirates had no answer too.
Bjarne Pedersen had got the Pirates off to a good start with an opening heat 1 victory and they took full advantage of some lack lustre trapping in the reserves race to register a 5-1 and take a 4 point lead.
Mads Korneliussen swept around Joe Screen to take the third with Karol Zabik sensibly settling for third after debating second place with Screen for a couple of laps, with the resulting 4-2 reducing the deficit.
Niels Kristian Iversen then levelled the match with an incredible 4 lap race over Chris Holder with the latter seemingly attached to his rear wheel for the entire race.
Zabik showed his intent to make up for lost time when he went around Pedersen on the outside whilst Korneliussen was managing a similar manoeuvre on the inside. Pedersen kept up the pace but the Panthers pairing were never really threatened and the first Panthers maximum saw the home side lead by 4 points.
A shared heat 6 was followed by a Poole 4-2 with Screen getting the better of Iversen and Davidsson shutting out a seemingly out of sorts Tully. . Heat 8 was an important heat and the Pirates duo made the better start, somehow Hurry who initially led the heat went backwards and Dryml who hadn’t made a great start to the meeting went in the opposite direction as he suddenly found grip to force his way to the front. Hansen who had also started poorly kept to the task and slipped passed Hurry later in the race to force a Panthers 4-2.
Korneliussen ran out of room on the first bend of heat 9 whilst attempting to get around Holder, with his subsequent exclusion not going down to well with all 4 back probably the better choice, despite the Poole pairing making good starts in the rerun Zabik somehow managed to find a gap between the fence and Piszcz on the back straight to reduce the Poole advantage.
Panthers then stepped up a gear and two maximums either side of a shared heat 11 saw them open up a 10 point lead, which resulted in Holder donning the black and white for heat 13.
This was clearly the race of the night as a blanket could have covered all 4 riders, nevertheless Pedersen maintained his lead from the gate whilst Holder wasn’t so fortunate, a mistake allowed both Bjerre and Iversen by and it looked to be heading for a 3-3, but Holder somehow snatched third place on the line from Iversen to register a Poole 5-2.
No mistakes from Zabik and Hansen in heat 14 as they powered impressively away for a Panthers 5-1, which appeared to settle matters, but Panthers were not finished and Bjerre and Iversen repeated that score line in the finale over the consistent Pedersen with Holder pegged at the rear.
Tully aside, this was an impressive team performance with everyone contributing to the score line, the return of Zabik not only adds his scoring potential but it also clearly lifted his team mates and the atmosphere in the press conference afterwards was very different to the opening few weeks.
All of the Panthers top 5 won heats and with Claus Vissing looking to return in a couple of week’s time, the future at Alwalton is now looking very much brighter.
Karol Zabik received a great reception from the supporters at the post match press conference and said “I would like to thank Rick Frost and the Peterborough management who have been very supportive over a difficult time for me I am delighted to be back and once my confidence returns I will be even better, but the atmosphere at the club now is great and we have a great team”.