Eastbourne Eagles paid a high price for Saturday night's dramatic 50-43 win over Arena Essex at Arlington Stadium which re-ignited their Elite League play-off hopes.

The Sussex side had young reserves Andrew Moore and Edward Kennett taken to hospital as both teams finished an accident-strewn meeting with only four fit riders.

The most serious injury was suffered by Moore, who sustained a broken leg when he ploughed into team-mate Adrian Miedzinski and was catapulted into the safety fence.

While Moore had nowhere to go when Miedzinski locked up in front of him in heat eight, neither did Kennett, who was involved in a three-man pile-up in heat two.

Kennett suffered a dislocated shoulder when he and Leigh Lanham crashed into Arena's Josh Larsen.

The injuries to Moore and Kennett delayed the meeting for 80 minutes.

The match might also have signalled the end of Horsham racer Kelvin Tatum's speedway career.

The three-times world long-track champion, who led England to World Cup glory in 1989, was forced to pull out of a meeting at Arlington for the second time this season and is facing a hip replacement operation in the winter.

The fact that Eastbourne bounced back from their heaviest defeat of the season at Ipswich two nights before to take all three points off Arena was little short of remarkable.

With both reserves stretchered out of the action, Eagles had to go into four races, including the rerun of heat two, with only one rider and with no representative at all in heat eight after Miedzinski had been excluded and with Moore on his way to hospital.

They conceded an 8-0 in heat eight and a 7-2 in heat 11 when first Dean Barker and then Mark Loram won the races as tactical riders on double points.

With four heats remaining, Eagles, who had built up a 13-point lead at one stage, were only three in front and under the cosh, but wins by lone rangers Joonas Kylmakorpi and Adam Shields either side of a blistering 5-1 by Joe Screen and Nicki Pedersen over Loram and Paul Hurry in heat 13 sealed an unlikely triumph.

Screen, back on his old stamping ground in place of David Norris, who was riding in the Grand Prix qualifier in Denmark, was magnificent, dropping his only points of the night to Loram, one in the fastest time of the night and the other after he had been knocked off by Barker.

Screen won three races, and Kylmakorpi might have done the same if the last race had not been stopped with him in front.

Arena's cause was not helped by a catalogue of machine failures involving Barker, Hurry and Larsen, all of which cost them vital points, and an uncharacteristic fall by Loram which resulted in a 5-1 for Shields and Kylmakorpi.

Lanham recovered from the second-heat crash to make a valuable contribution, but Larsen, like Miedzinski later in the meeting, was reduced to touring around on the off chance of picking up a stray point.

Things looked promising for the visitors when Barker beat Kylmakorpi and Shields first time out, but a run of three 5-1 heats leading up to heat eight put Eastbourne in the driving seat.

When the meeting restarted, the falls continued. Shields went down, taking Kylmakorpi with him into the fence, but Eagles picked themselves up and clung on.

The synchronised double-wheelie by Screen and Pedersen down the home straight after they had seen off Loram, and effectively Arena's last blast, summed it all up.

David Norris missed out on a place in next year's Grand Prix series on a disappointing night at Vojens, where the Eastbourne captain failed to make it through to the semi-finals.

The meeting was won by Sweden's Brazilian-born star Antonio Lindback, with Tomasz Chrzanowski, of Poland, claiming the other Grand Prix place. Hans Andersen, one of the favourites, suffered engine failure in the final.