PIRATES chief Matt Ford has revealed that their attendances last season weren't any higher than in 2002 despite the club enjoying unprecedented treble-winning success.

Poole fans are still, in some ways, pinching themselves that their team lifted the Sky Sports Elite League, Knockout Cup and British League Cup in 2003.

But Ford has confirmed that the most successful on-track campaign in the Dorset club's illustrious 56-year history had not increased gates at Wimborne Road.

Pirates, however, believe their unattractive programme of home fixtures during the school holiday period of late-July and August was to blame for overall attendance figures remaining static.

And Ford has stressed the club - who never release official figures but are believed to average about 3,500 for home meetings, with a high of about 6,000 for the best matches - will not make the same mistake this time around.

He said: "Amazingly, the gates weren't quite as high as you would expect, so there is definite room for improvement.

"Overall, our attendances were not any better because we were a winning team.

"The whole league needs to be more on the ball with how we plan our fixtures, but in particular at Poole we have to make sure that we have attractive home meetings during the main school summer holiday period.

"We only had two rain-offs out of 34 meetings last year and got through our fixtures very quickly. That meant that come August, we had a poor month in terms of meetings at the stadium.

"The school holiday period affected our gates badly, and those poor gates were mainly down to the fact we had to put on British League Cup fixtures against mostly Premier League teams, which some people felt less attractive and stayed away from.

"I can assure our fans that this year it will be a lot different.

"With Swindon and Arena Essex joining the top flight so that we now have 10 teams, it has made life easier planning the fixture list.

"And mark my words, August meetings at Poole Stadium this year will be very mouth-watering.

"We've got the World Team Cup semi-finals and final on August 5 and 7 and after that we are going to make sure that month is a really good one for home Pirates fixtures.

"Having only British League Cup fixtures hit us hard last August. We would have been much better with Elite League fixtures and have learnt a valuable major lesson."

The tapes go up at Wimborne Road on Wednesday, March 10 when Poole host Swindon in a challenge, but - and Speedway is its own worst enemy in this respect - Pirates have not released their official fixture list yet.

A club spokesman stressed that their hands were tied until the British Speedway Promoters' Association confirmed the whole fixture list could be released.

That is not expected to be until the end of next week at the earliest.

Poole, however, are provisionally booked to host Belle Vue on August 11 in the league and will then probably host title play-off and cup fixtures for the rest of the month if they are still in those competitions.