Wolves 47 King’s Lynn Stars 43

For the third successive home league match, Wolves sneaked home in a last-heat decider.

But where the successes against Lakeside and Poole were hard-earned, here the home team’s failings – plus a helping hand from referee Dale Entwistle – made hard work of a relatively straight-forward task.

Valiantly as the stylish Niels-Kristian Iversen and the ever chirpy Mads Korneliussen rode, a King’s Lynn team with top gun Kenneth Bjerre misfiring and rider-replacement an inadequate facility for the injured Olly Allen should have been despatched in some comfort.

Instead a succession of errors – and guest Davey Watt’s puncture when in command of heat one – kept the visitors in the hunt.

Indeed, when Bjerre finally sprang to life to win heat 11, followed immediately by a Stars 5-1 from Korneliussen and Kozza Smith to level the scores, it rather looked as if Lynn would take a victory that would have all but secured their play-off spot.

But Watt showed commitment above and beyond the call of duty for a guest with a blistering pass of Bjerre in a harum-scarum heat 13, with riders swapping positions with bewildering rapidity.

Iversen eventually got the better of captain Peter Karlsson for third, but Wolves had stopped the rot.

Tai Woffinden and Ludvig Lindgren tucked in behind Korneliussen for a tied penultimate race and, yet again, it was all on the last as the rain spattered down.

From the racing perspective the final race was an anti-clima, but a welcome one for Wolves fans as Watt and Woffinden gated emphatically, leaving Korneliussen and Iversen out of contention.

Wolves, with Watt and Woffinden in fine form, Ty Proctor winning two races and Ricky Wells solid – he will relish the heat five 5-1 over the brothers Bjerre – were six points to the good after five races.

But there’s a fine line between quick and ragged and Lindgren in particular looked guilty of over-pressing, suffering the consequences with two falls.

Proctor, too, had to abandon ship after coming up to Kyle Newman more quickly than he would have imagined possible in heat six – a hasty move on the first lap when the visitor could have been picked off at leisure.

On top of that, Wolves looked good for a maximum heat win in heat 10 which would have put their lead into double figures and surely proved decisive.

Watt and Proctor scooted clear as Korneliussen went wide and inadvertently brought down Kozza Smith on the second turn – a disqualification offence apparently clear to everyone in the stadium with the exception of the match official, who ruled all four back.

Korneliussen rubbed salt into the wound by winning the re-run and from that point Lynn looked the likely winners – until the very last race.

By Tim Hamblin