I'll never forgive your lot for the frightful 4-0 beating you gave us in 99/00 season. Never. A horrible drive down there (we'd been in Edinburgh the night before) then back in the car and on the way home again after 15 minutes.
It’s games like that which still have me thinking it’s odd to go to teams like Watford and Bournemouth as hopeless underdogs.
The club never really adapted to going out of the top flight. Finances were a mess which led to the club selling its stake in the Ricoh and being subject to an eye watering rent and reduced access to revenues. SISU’s arrival led to a quick punt under Chris Coleman but he blew the funds and they turned off the tap. Cue going into L1 in 2012 with SISU focussing more on busting the stadium to buy it on the cheap. They didn’t because the council sold it to Wasps instead. Tony Mowbray’s disastrous recruitment led to a drop to L2 after which Robins has performed a minor miracle in recruiting sensibly and sticking to a set way of playing. It has also repaired the previously toxic relationship between the club and its support. In truth we are back in the Championship a season too early I think but here we are and after all that’s gone on, 21st would be a successful outing. We won’t go any higher without an owner with more money than sense which seems to be the norm in this league.
A real rollercoaster. It's the fans that have to live with all the nonsense. Watford might be seen as 'all that's wrong with modern football' by some but we did get out of this league without a rich owner pumping in cash. It is possible.
This is what irks me about it how we're perceived. Derby will get taken over and spend their way to the PL, and that will be fine. We did it through the benefit of our owners incrementally improving Udinese over about a 20 year period without any real cash to do so. Wasn’t Bielsa Leeds’s highest ever paid manager? Yeah but that’s ok, because it’s Leeds.
This season is our last chance at staying ace. If we don't go up, we'll be back to being tinpot old watford again with probable trips to L1 and L2 in the near future, don't worry.
If memory serves you were able to basically sign Udinese on loan which may have helped just a tiny bit. My beef isn’t really with Watford on this though, it’s the likes of Wolves completely taking the piss then getting praised for it. Parachute payments are also obscene and I was never really a fan of having Watford v Burnley pitched to me as the clash of the century-but that’s not your fault. We don’t have a hope of competing in this league long term unless we were to gamble our future.
That is how we did it, but bear in mind our owners had owned Udinese for a good 20 years before that, they’ve never been rich in football terms. They got Udinese to a top four finish eventually through scouting players and player trading, it didn’t happen over night. They then bought us and we were able to benefit from that 20+ years of getting Udinese to the point where they could spare us enough players to eventually get us promoted. At the time it was a perfectly legal way to do it and anybody could’ve done it before us. Then people like Holloway moaned and the loan ‘loophole’ was closed. Much more acceptable for everyone for rich owners to just chuck money at it, apparently.
My favourite thing about Coventry is the amazing stat that they had to wait for 48 years to finish in the top 6 of any league they were in. 1970: 6th in the old First Division. 2018: 6th in League Two (and promoted via the play-offs).
As I hope I’ve made clear I don’t put you in the same bracket as the biggest piss takers. But it did strike me as unfair for dual owned clubs to be able to just gift plenty of players free of charge. A bit of an unfair advantage if still within the rules. Leicester took the piss far more at a similar time. It is what it is. In the ownership stakes we drew the short straw.
I wouldn't look with envy to us. What good did our owners do us? We had a handful of years in the top league where we lost more often than not, with many absolute thrashings every season. We bought a team of completely disinterested players who see us as absolutely nothing more than a stepping stone and couldnt give a single shyt about WFC, players who almost all fans would agree are the most despised set of players in our history. Players who got relegated without so much as a whimper. We've had managers who openly hated the fans (rightfully). On top of that we had a world record cup final defeat beamed to a billion people worldwide. The icing on the cake being our fanbase who thought they would take the opportunity to use that world record hammering not to give our spineless players hell, but to humiliate the club utterly by waving plastic flags as the goals rained in. If anything summed up our past few years it's that moment. People think being in the premier league is the promised land, but it's anything but. Meanwhile you've been down in the shytleagues but winning far more than you lose, and still have a major trophy in your locker. Whereas we still have not won anything meaningful in our entire history.
However, we were a lower table championship club heading for administration before our owners arrived, we had three sided ground that was falling apart and the owners have transformed this. The club is in a far better place than it was before The Pozzo's arrived and one thing that is for sure is that Watford football club is in a better place than Coventry City in every aspect. The likelihood is we will be two division apart again next season.
With respect, I would. We don’t even play in our own ground never mind own it and have been a footballing irrelevance for a long time. Mostly because of the owners who we have been plagued with for 13 years but also a council that has a lot of contempt for the club. I would gladly swap it all for a few years in the top division with the odd relegation and our own stadium. I don’t think anybody in our league would swap with us.
I have to say I didn't fully follow your club's misfortune, I assume CCFC used to own Highfield Road and I guess used outside finance for the Ricoh, do CCFC own any percentage of it, or is it just SISU?
We sold our stake in the Ricoh before it was built. SISU never had a share and it’s now all owned by Wasps who aren’t letting us play there.
Honestly I had no idea about your ground woes and was just reading about it. Kicked out by Wasps! I thought they played in London. What a balls up. You're lucky there's a pandemic, I presume it would be an absolute ballache to get to matches in brum (I had no idea you were playing there now). But this mess will resolve itself sooner or later and you'll be back playing in coventry at some point. And you'll still have a major trophy and we will not.
To be fair they have been playing there for a little while now, they played Brum in the cup in Birmingham last season or the one before and Coventry were the home team. Many of my Coventry City supporting mates preferred it in Birmingham, trains are very regular and the fast train is around 15 minutes and it's a much better day out pre and post match drinking on broad street or the mail box than it is in Coventry.
Perhaps in the very short term but nobody seriously wants this going on any longer than it absolutely has to. COVID has in a weird way helped keep the disadvantage of playing there to a minimum. The problem is that a path to returning either involves Wasps relenting or SISU finding money and permission for a new stadium. Either of those happening is about as likely as us holding on with 10 minutes to go.
FFS I was actually starting to feel sorry for this chap for a while. Who gives a *** who owns the ground if the match day experience is miles better this way. And he's got the cheek to come on here handing out sob stories to us, a team who've got one of the worst pre match selection of pubs in the country!
Tell you what. We’ll take your players and money, you can take St Andrews. Scratch that just give us Deeney
To be fair I live in Coventry and it does feel that there is something missing in the City without the football. My step father is Cov fan and he actually thought that playing at St Andrews last season helped the team, he says there was a bit of a better atmosphere and the fans that travelled were more patient with the players. I always thought that The Butts, or the Coventry speedway/Dogs stadium could have been good sites for a ground. Although the latter probably hasn't got the right roads and is technically in Rugby Borough. On a side note I was speaking to my mate about the weekends game earlier and he told me your fixtures so far, Coventry have played 6 out of the current top 7 and also Blackburn and Brentford. That is a very tough start.
This is true, but even despite that we really ought to have more points on the board than we do. You could see quite nicely on Saturday why we don't.
Yes I felt that we didn't have to work hard enough to score our goals and we didn't play well at all but then again we haven't all season and are still a point of the top, but I do think you will be m pick up points against the sides around the bottom.
Compared to the Premier League, it's actually pretty rare for clubs promoted from League One to go straight back down, and of those that do, almost all of them are small clubs with limited experience of this level (Southend, Peterborough, Yeovil, Rotherham etc) or that have recently been punching well above their weight and are going back to their natural level (Wigan). The only exception in recent years has been Charlton who are a similar size to Coventry, but they seem to be a bit of a shambles, a far cry from the Alan Curbishley years. I think Coventry will be fine.
We will never live down: The vegetable waving, it will persist for decades. Seriously who started that, someone most know? The 6-0 defeat beamed to Billions We may get over the following collective shame: Never having won a significant trophy (which will in some way alleviate the 6-0)
https://bhappy.wordpress.com/category/five-a-day-awaydays/ We're an absolute disgrace. A laughing stock. Which one of the whoppers on here is Jeff Bartrop. Show yourself.
