Coventry City

The Coventry City ‘Who are You?’: Oh what a night(mare), 1977 style

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Ian Davidson: ‘at Wembley for the playoff final last May with my wife, Chris, and daughter Nikki’ City beat Exeter to go up

 

Monsieur Salut writes: Salut! Sunderland, it is fair to say, has had fun and games with Coventry City fans over the years. We still, absurd as such a long-held grievance may seem, don’t like what happened that night in 1977 when our relegation was sealed by a deliberately non-competitive end to the delayed Coventry-Bristol City game. Congestion in the Midlands meant they knew our result before the game ended; our defeat at Everton while they were level on 2-2, meant both sides needed only to play out a draw to stay up. They, in a nutshell, say get over it and some say there was nothing to get over in the first place. We still feel an acute sense of foul play.

Ian Davidson*, who happens to be deputy chairman of the Coventry supporters’ club’s London branch and is also secretary of Sky Blues International for exiled fans, was there that night. He’s also a level-headed City fan and his point of view on that event is important. It should be read in the context of a tremendous set of answers to unrelated questions, which he stresses represent  his views alone. I hope and expect any responses from Salut! Sunderland  readers to be respectful …

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Coventry City vs Sunderland prize Guess the Score. Seize the chance ahead of Peterborough crunch game

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There is a prize and City fans are warmly invited to have a go, too. You judge whether it’s a great one

Another big Sunderland following will be on the road this weekend for the visit to Coventry City and the Ricoh, hardly a name with the appeal to any football fan of Highfield Road but the one demanded by the Japanese sponsors of the the sports, hotel and shopping complex where it is situated.

Will the travelling support witness the sort of  Sunderland display that dismissed Rochdale with some ease or the one that stuttered and stumbled at Burton? We’ll see.

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Coventry are base as Peterborough join Charlton, Barnsley and Portsmouth (and SAFC) on our watch list

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There should have been an update to this series (see the archive links below for the earlier posts) at the start of the season but I travelled up early for the Charlton game, spending the Friday in Leeds before driving on to the North-East, then when I got back home I did a match report to complement Pete Sixsmith’s and didn’t have time for anything else.

This was followed by five games in two weeks, with no space to fit anything in, and here we are.

This means my last post in the series was the one that explained the role of Coventry City‘s fans in propelling their club up and Sunderland down in our poll and asked who should be the sixth team to join Coventry, Sunderland, Charlton, Barnsley and Portsmouth in our  deliberations. Peterborough was the very clear preference from the four choices offered; they got more votes than the other three clubs (Southend, Plymouth and Luton) combined.

Those six will be the ones we start with, and I can’t imagine it changing before Christmas.

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Aye, Aye, Aye Aye, Sky Blues prefer us to the Ricoh

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John McCormick writes:  if you want to know the origin of the headline you’ll have to read on to the middle of this piece, where Malcolm, our esteemed deputy editor, has reworked a version of the old Fulwell End favourite “Monty is better than Yashin” following a recent barrage of voting from the Sky Blue bit of the West Midlands.

I have to say I found that barrage a bit strange. After all, when a blog adopts a title which includes the phrase “dodgy numbers”, and then ends with a disclaimer which states “the arithmetic’s correct, it’s just the rest could be a bit wonky” it’s best not to take it too seriously.

And when it says “unless new voter(s) decide to cast vote(s) for only one team and to throw rationality to the winds – and why not, it’s what football’s all about”, which is what I wrote in my last post, you might get some idea that we welcome other clubs’ fans and enjoy hearing from them.

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Burton, Scunthorpe or Peterborough – who’ll join Sunderland, Barnsley, Charlton and Portsmouth?

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UPDATE: we saw the poll had grown, improbably, to 11,000+ votes with Coventry way out in front on 26 per cent. Couldn’t blame Jimmy Hill this time but something was clearly up.  For the culprits, go to the Coventry site Sky Blues Talk    … but don’t get too cross as our lot would gladly have done the same to them. The poll, unsurprisingly, is suspended …

After Colin reposted our “who’s going up?” poll (on the left, below) in one of the Question and Answer sessions  with our owners there  was brief flurry of voting, as you might have expected given the number of visitors we had. And then things slowed down until, by the weekend, things were at a trickle, although votes were and are still coming in. Again, this was to be expected as the eyes of the football world were on Russia, where eight or nine ex-Sunderland players were taking part in the World’s most prestigious competition outside the Third Division. We now have over 800 votes cast, which is enough to be going on with, although Colin in his gut feeling poll, had almost as many when only one vote was allowed per person.

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Barnsley drop, Burton and Posh replace Luton and Scunthorpe, Walsall get off the bottom in our promotion poll.

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When I first put this poll up, a mere week ago, I wrote

“this is predominantly a Sunderland site and we aren’t claiming results are totally unbiased… …Nevertheless, I think it’s fair to say that SAFC  fans have not been blindly optimistic.”

After only a week I would not able to add a lot to this statement, were it not for two things. The first is that the poll was tagged to promote it to all League One fans for over 24 hours before it was promoted on our facebook page and then on Colin’s subsequent posts on this site. This gave us a small (very small, as it happens) hint of what the whole of the League One fanbase might think. The second was that Colin’s own poll closed, with some findings we can bring to bear on this one.

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The bookies say Sunderland, Barnsley, Charlton, Portsmouth, Luton and Scunthorpe. What about you?

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And so we have it: the fixtures are out. You’ll be getting your fill of dates, and conjecture from all over, no doubt, and enjoying the pre-season buzz of anticipation that it brings.

But when you’re tucked up under the sheets, reading Charles Buchan’s “Football Monthly” with a torch and reality bites, do you think you’ll win League One?

Or even get promoted?

If you do, please let us know. If you don’t, let us know who you think will make the grade.

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SAFC v Norwich City ‘Who are You?’: a Canary sent from Coventry

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Jake: check out the Who are You? series at
Jake: check out the Who are You? series at https://safc.blog/category/who-are-you-2015-2016/

This has happened before, but only once I think. Paddy Davitt* sees Norwich City week in, week out. He feels the emotion when they win, was thrilled by the Wembley playoff win and ‘cares a great deal about Norwich’s fortunes’. But he is not a fan. Paddy is the chief Norwich City writer for the Archant media group that includes the Eastern Daily Press. But he supports that infamous bête noire for Sunderland supporters, Coventry City. I think we had a WBA ‘Who are You? interviewee who was in a similar position (reporting on Albion, not being a supporter), though he didn’t declare his true allegiance. See what Paddy made of our questions (posed before we knew of his footballing preference) ahead of a match he predicts the Canaries will win, leaving us pointless and – he believes – doomed along with Watford and Bournemouth …

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