Many supporters at Armadale will be puzzled why Sheffield used rider replacement to cover the injured Robbie Kessler. That left Sheffield with two heat leaders and a very long tail. Despite the best efforts of Simon Stead and Sean Wilson, they were always going to stuggle to defend a 13 point lead for the bonus point.

It now has emerged that Sheffield fell foul of the new rule for guest replacements. In the past a rider could be replaced by a guest of a lower average. Now the points available for a guest depend on the injured or unavailable riders' home or away average. Hence Edinburgh had up to 10.55 points available to replace Robert Eriksson at Armadale but only 8.47 in away matches. Indeed when Blair Scott was injured for the trip to Stoke they had only 3.89 points to play with and opted for young three-pointer Rory Schlein.

Sheffield had lined up David Walsh to replace Kessler. This loooked a good move as Walsh is a similar type of rider to Kessler. Walsh was ruled out because his overall average was higher than Kessler's away average. By the time that this was clarified it was too late to look for a replacement and rider replacement was the only option.

It is hard to say if this would have affected the outcome. There is no doubt that Edinburgh would have won the match anyway but the battle for the aggregate match point might have been very interesting.

It does seem astonishing that such a mistake could have been made by a team management. It is not the first example of apparent ignorance of the rulebook by supposedly knowledgable teams managers and promoters. Hull brought Lee Redmond over from Australia and tried to loan him to Berwick as a three-point rider. This was based on a misunderstanding of the rules. Like Christian Henry, Redmond has UK status and did not need a work permit. However unlike Christian Henry when he joined Monarchs, Redmond had appeared in an Australian Final. As a consequence of this Redmond received an assessed seven point average and was ruled out of riding for Berwick. He eventually found a team place in Elite League King's Lynn to replace our own Ross Brady.

Of course the alternative view is that the promoters concerned knew well the rules but were trying it on!