NEWPORT Mike Manning Audio Wasps last night celebrated turning back the clock 47 years by emulating their long-forgotten 1964 Knockout Cup final win over Cradley Heath.

This time, however, skipper Leigh Lanham’s men downed the colours of none other than the British Premier League champions elect over two legs.

They travelled to Glasgow for yesterday’s second leg as red-hot favourites to lift their first piece of team silverware since their 1999 Premier Trophy win over another Scottish side, Edinburgh Monarchs.

The Wasps were defending a massive 40-point lead engineered from Saturday night’s 65-25 first-leg win at their Queensway Meadows Stadium home track.

That win was the product of the best home performance in the 14 years since the club was re-formed and was just a few points short of its record-breaking 68-22 BPL win over Plymouth Devils back in mid- August.

At QMS the Wasps posted no fewer than nine 5-1 maximums on a night when the hapless visitors could only muster one heat win, a 4-2 success for Nick Morris and Richard Sweetman in race seven.

There was some magnificent individual riding by dashing Dane Charlie Gjedde, Australian ace Jason Doyle and influential skipper Leigh Lanham, while Swedish stars Robin Aspegren and Ander Mellgren also had the bit between their teeth.

Wasps’ Australian reserves, Mark Jones and Todd Kurtz, outshone Glasgow pair David Bellego and Theo Pijper by 14-2, and this proved the rock on which the home side built this brilliant win.

There are a few Elite League teams who wouldn’t have been able to live with the Wasps at this track and on this form and it’s to Glasgow’s credit that I can’t recall one four-lapper where there was even a shred of doubt that both visiting riders were trying anything less than 100 per cent.

In Gjedde the Wasps have a rider now officially classed as a club cult hero to stand alongside the likes of Frank Smart and Anders Henrikkson.

It’s a fact that there are groans of disappointment among home fans if Gjedde gates well – the Wasps faithful preferring him to have to swashbuckle his way from the back in breathtaking style.

They were treated to some of that skill here, although the most exciting race he was involved in – heat 10 – he actually lost.

But his tremendous effort to first get past team-mate Anders Mellgren and then attempt to pass eventual winner Nick Morris will long live in the memory.

For about half a dozen fixtures after Gjedde’s arrival in early June there were many describing the Wasps as a one-man team.

That theory has been blown out of the water over the past month or so, and in this instance it was well and truly buried because there were no weak links in the home side.

To a man the Wasps were quite superb and had it not been for Morris, who really looked the only visiting rider who could find a place in the Wasps team, then the second leg would have been nothing less than a formality.

Even Robin Aspegren managed a third-place finish after starting off 15 metres in heat 12’s re-run and his chasing and eventual overtaking of Theo Pijper is another moment to bring forward from the memory bank on a dark winter’s night.

Wasps scorers: At Glasgow on Sunday, 41: 1 – Charlie Gjedde 7(4); 2 – Anders Mellgren 7(4); 3 – Robin Aspegren 2(4); 4 – Jason Doyle 10(5); 5 – Leigh Lanham 9+1(5); 6 – Mark Jones 3+1(5); 7 – Todd Kurtz 3(3).

At Newport on Saturday, 65: Gjedde 12+2(5); Mellgren 9+2(4); Aspegren 6+3(4); 4 Doyle 13(5); Lanham 11(4); Jones 6+3(4); Kurtz 8+1(4).