Far away from the documentary makers and the media circus, it looked like just another season of chaos at Coventry City. This is a club that has feasted upon ignominy and turmoil as its daily bread for at least a decade, where every dawn is preceded and succeeded by darkness and the only certainty is that something is either about to, or just has, gone wrong.
The league campaign began with farce. With the Coventry Building Society Arena hosting the Commonwealth Games Rugby Sevens tournament over the summer, the pitch was unusable for professional football. Cue pointed fingers, as ever.
Chief executive Dave Boddy accused Wasps of promising a new pitch, only for them to enter administration. The only legacy of the Games here was a mud bath and a five-point deduction for Coventry City, mercifully suspended pending any other setbacks.
Coventry began their league season from behind the start line but somehow already nursing a stitch. They had four home games postponed and failed to win any of their first seven matches, sitting bottom of the Championship on 8 October.
By 5 December, the club had confirmed that they had been served an eviction notice by Mike Ashley’s Frasers Group, who had purchased the operating companies that managed the stadium when they entered administration. To repeat: just another Coventry City season.
Yet if there is one seam that runs through this club’s modern history, it is not their submergence in, or suffocation by, self-concocted hysteria, but their unerring ability to rise above it. The Championship is littered with clubs either being swallowed by financial difficulty or inertia or slowly reacting to it. Coventry are an exception.
Whatever happens to them, the team always copes. Since a 1-0 defeat at West Brom on 3 February, Coventry have lost one of their 13 league games. From the Championship relegation zone at the end of October to the edge of the play-offs in April.
There are three protagonists of this latest unlikely rejuvenation. The first is striker Viktor Gyokeres, aka Brighton’s only major transfer mistake of the last three years. Coventry were able to sign the Sweden international striker for just £1m in 2021. He is probably the most complete striker in England’s second tier and his next goal or assist will take him to 30 for this Championship season.
If the fear is that Gyokeres will leave this summer, the opposite should be true. With a contract expiring in June 2024, selling your best player for many more times the price you paid should not be seen as an admission of weakness.
The last player Coventry sold for more than £4m was Lee Hughes in 2002 – it has been too long.
Without money from player sales coming in and with former owners Sisu not prepared to invest significantly in transfer fees, Coventry got a little stuck.
Gustavo Hamer (whose value has also increased since purchase) is the only player signed by Coventry for more than £1m since Freddy Eastwood in 2008. Progress has come despite the budgets, through academy talent and the loan and free transfer market.
Which brings us to the second protagonist and the miracle worker of Coventry’s last half decade. It is not a competition in which Mark Robins would wish to enter – he is a humble and unassuming man – but there can be no manager in English football who has done a better job over the last five years. He took over a team consigned to the fourth tier and brought it back up. More than anyone else, Robins has rebuilt this club.
In that first summer, Robins lost a vast chunk of his first-team squad and was trying to manage a club on the verge of civil war. He earned their first top-six finish in any division in almost 50 years and has since finished in a higher position in each successive season.
Avoid a late-season collapse, and that will be true for the fifth straight campaign. His ability to overcome the noise (Robins has managed Coventry in three different home stadiums) is extraordinary.
This is where this story normally ends. Robins is the good news angel of Coventry City, but there’s always a “but” or at least a vacuum where more good news should be. Until now, perhaps. In November 2022, local businessman Doug King agreed to buy a 85 per cent stake in Coventry City and, more importantly, Sisu agreed to sell. By January, King effected a complete buyout of Sisu’s shares and confirmed that the club was entirely debt-free.
That this news did not immediately cause wild mass celebration tells its own story. Coventry City supporters have been hardwired towards mistrust or circumspection because they have had their spirits broken by false hope too many times before. Social media chatter wondered whether King had links to Sisu and whether, therefore, this was simply the previous regime rebadged.
King has agreed new contracts for key players Ben Sheaf, Ben Wilson and Kyle McFadzean. Investment to upgrade training facilities that Robins described as “awful” last year has been agreed and work has already begun. Next is an agreement on a stadium lease with Ashley to ensure that Coventry don’t require a fifth home stadium in 10 years, but there is confidence that good news will come.
More importantly than all of that, a line of communication now exists between the owner and the supporters. King has attended the supporters’ forums and has given honest answers. He has spoken about investment in the playing staff but also sustainability and securing the long-term future of the club. He is no billionaire, nor the head of an autocratic state.
But that’s never what Coventry – the city, the supporters, the community – asked for. They simply wanted a club that they could believe was committed to moving in the right direction and, finally, at peace.
They wanted something to be proud of, not that they offered apologies for or described with dark humour. Trust will take time, because all healing does, but that process will only make the bonds stronger. This is a special club that has been through too much.
from Football - inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/rR6C4IO
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