Time has come for Tully to fulfil his potential for the Edinburgh Monarchs

Andrew Tully enters his fifth spell with Edinburgh Scotwaste Monarchs and some feel the 24-year-old rider has reached a crossroads in his career in terms of what the future holds for him.

Tully, who lines up against Newcastle Diamonds in tonight's Premier Shield season curtain raiser at Armadale, knows this could be a breakthrough year for him providing the ability he possesses is not suppressed by mistakes of his own making.

Although Monarchs won the league in 2010, from a personal point of view, things did not go according to plan for Tully.

Injuries thwarted his ambition and that misfortune was compounded by some careless errors and misjudgements in some of his races round Armadale, as a consequence his average dipped below the seven-point mark. When in full flow Tully can look majestic but, frustratingly, this wasn't glimpsed on a weekly basis. Tully himself doesn't try to mask his shortcomings and admitted the broken arm he sustained at Glasgow's Ashfield towards the end of the year did affect him.

"But I came back from that and got going again before the season finished," he said.

"However, generally my form was up and down simply because I crashed a lot of the time, I was either having good races, or I was falling off.

"And to be honest I did have a lack of confidence in some meetings because of this."

Tully is a rider who is hard on himself - and others - if things go wrong and his first priority this season is to avoid being carted off to hospital.

He says: "I obviously want to avoid picking up any injuries and I also want to bring more consistency to my riding.

"I felt I had improved my gating last season, by a little bit, not a lot, but it's not perfect by any means.

"If I could gate consistently and race to the same standard I could move forward a bit with respect to my career."

Tully added: "I did pick up some points at Armadale but I struggled away from home and this made it a lot harder for me."

Tully will be in the vanguard of Monarchs' defence of their league crown and insists the absence of Ryan Fisher in the ranks, while a big loss, is not cataclysmic.

"Ryan was the top rider in the Premier League last season. His scoring for the team was awesome and to have someone like that in your squad was a huge benefit.

"But Kevin (Wolbert) is No.?1 now and he is capable of doing that as well, I think our top five are capable of challenging each other, and if the whole team rides as well as we know we can, it should be another decent year for us.

"But it's always hard to follow up a league winning year because there is so much expectation on everybody.

"I'm not expecting too much, yet last year when we kicked off the season, the Premier Trophy competition was a disaster for us.

"Then we got going and never looked back."

Monarchs boss John Campbell is convinced Tully will re-ignite his form this season and said: "Andrew isn't someone who worries about injuries and on his day he can be the best rider in the league.

"He puts in some extraordinary performances away from home and he is still young enough of doing better.

"I'll be disappointed if he doesn't push his average up this season, and he should be nudging towards the seven-and-a half or eight-point mark.

"His ability suggests this is something he can easily do."

Newcastle are likely to give Monarchs a stiff examination and already have silverware under their belt with home and away victories against Berwick Bandits in last weekend's Tyne/Tweed Trophy matches.

Despite losing Kenni Larsen to the Elite League, the Diamonds managed to snap up Stuart Robson on a handy average from the top division as his replacement.

With Danish rider Rene Bach and Mark Lemon still on board, the Diamonds don't look any weaker than they were 12 months ago, and Lemon dropped just one point in ten rides against the Bandits.