ELITSERIEN: Lejonen win regular season

After a shorted season with just eight matches, Gislaved Lejonen, are winners of the regular season for 2020 for the first time since 2008.

The playoffs

All eight teams will go into the playoffs which start next week with the quarterfinals on Tuesday 22 September and a return match the following day. The Semis will be played the following week and then the final the week after that.

It was pre-decided that it would be 1 v 8; 2 v 7, 3 v 6 and 4 v 5 and the team with the lowest positioning in the table will race at home first. So the fixtures will be:

Indianerna v Dackarna

Piraterna v Lejonen

Västervik v Rospiggarna

Masarna v Vetlanda

New recruits on the way

However, many teams have recruited extra riders from the Ekstraliga. Therefore, the rosters are starting to look very different from those that started the season. Clubs and riders were very conservative in the early part of the year, as the Coronavirus spread and no-one knew what would happen. But now with the chance of a Swedish championship insight, the rosters are more and more dominated by SGP riders taking the places of the young Swedes and Danes who have been making up the majority of the teams so far.

A big impact

The rider averages table reflects the influence of the world’s best riders -even if they have raced half of the season with Danish SGP rider Niels-Kristian Iversen (3 matches) and European champion, Robert Lambert (4 matches) at the top. The highest scoring rider who has raced all 8 matches is Masarna’s Kim Nilsson. The Swede is the third highest scorer in the league after the regular season.

But Bartosz Zmarzlik raced his first match for Vetlanda Speedway yesterday scoring a full maximum 15 points. Meanwhile, Dackarna have confirmed that Maciej Janowski and Patryk Dudek are now under contract with the Målilla club.

It means it is difficult to predict who will take home the championship in three weeks time as it may come down to availability of the SGP riders.

Top 10 riders after regular season:

Niels-Kristian Iversen (Indianerna) 2.800

Robert Lambert (Lejonen) 2.750

Kim Nilsson (Masarna) 2.524

Nikolai Klindt (Lejonen) 2.500

Rohan Tungate (Lejonen) 2.333

Jonas Jeppesen (Indianerna) 2.324

Jacob Thorssell (Dackarna) 2.310

Antonio Lindbäck (Masarna) 2.279

Rasmus Jensen (Rospiggarna) 2.186

Jonas Davidsson (Piraterna) 2.152