May 28th and I'm going back just 3 years to 2018 and the League 2 Play-Off Final at Wembley.
Living in Warwickshire as I do, at around 13 miles away, Coventry City are my nearest League club and I tend to see them a couple of times per season because they are so close. In recent years City have been in terrible turmoil which has its roots back in the overspending made to preserve their top flight membership in the 1990's. After several narrow escapes, Coventry's luck finally ran out with relegation in 2001 after 34 seasons at the top level.
Major problems with the club's finances soon surfaced and, in 2005, the club sold their traditional home at Highfield Road to property developers and moved to a new edge-of-town state of the art Arena then known, for sponsorship reasons, as the Ricoh (now the Coventry Building Society Arena from 2021). The problem with the Ricoh was that the club was only a tenant with the stadium being jointly owned by Coventry City Council and a charity. As a result, the football club had to pay a large annual rent and was unable to generate matchday revenues as these belonged to the landlord.
In 2007 the Sky Blues (a poor choice of nickname when you have an elephant on your club badge surely?) came within 20 minutes of administration before being taken over by the London-based hedge fund SISU Capital, fronted by former player (though not for Coventry City) Ray Ranson. With hindsight it's difficult to know whether City would have been better off going into administration and one wonders what SISU make of their investment 14 years on? The football club suffers terribly from SISU's attempts at strongarm negotiating tactics which lurch them from one crisis to another. In 2012 City were relegated back to the third tier for the first time in almost 50 years. In 2013 the club quit the Ricoh Arena over a rent dispute and played home games 35 miles away at Northampton's Sixfields Stadium for a season. A little over a year later and City were back at the Ricoh following a Football League brokered settlement of the dispute. Sadly, in 2014, Rugby Union club Wasps became outright owners of the Ricoh Arena with rugby-related branding becoming increasingly evident at the stadium.
Sky Blue fans protested long and loud against SISU with high profile demonstrations coinciding with failure on the pitch as they were relegated yet again in 2017 into the fourth tier of English football for the first time since 1959. They had reached the bottom and now, surely, the only way was up? Season 2017-18 saw the team finish in a top six position in their league for the first time since 1970. Be careful when you make use of terms such as "long suffering" to describe a club's football fans. Surely no club's fans could be more long suffering than Coventry's? Top six meant the League 2 Play-Offs and the Sky Blues overcame Notts County in the Semi-Final to face Exeter City at Wembley.
The game was a triumph for Mark Robins' side as they dominated and defeated Exeter 3-1 using a number of promising young players. All the goals were of high quality (watch the video attached to my blog to see what I mean) as Willis, Shipley and Grimmer scored three times in the third quarter of the game in front of 50,196 fans (the majority were from Coventry) to clinch promotion. It was Coventry's first promotion since 1967 and the first step on "the long road back" but until the club gets a stadium of its own, it will never thrive. Pesky wasps!
CRB Match No. 2230
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