COVENTRY may never be the city of cultural football, but for years it was a bastion of the top division. Then suddenly it went bump.
The 1987 FA Cup winners enjoyed the company of Manchester United, Arsenal and other clubs who regard themselves as aristocrats of English football for 34 years.
Then the call was made to leave Highfield Road, a stadium with restricted views and the facilities of a club in the National League North.
The move was a calamity and sparked a head-spinning period in which they were briefly based at the shiny new Ricoh Arena, capacity 32,000.
The whole city protested at the way the club was treated there. Within years it had become a Cinderella business.
The Ricoh staged rock concerts as the Sky Blues dropped to League Two, a victim of people who I suspect didn’t quite know how to build on their precious football asset.
The club had been built in the image of Jimmy Hill, a canny operator.
He was a long-time manager and boardroom figure and his exit shook City. But the Ricoh was taken over by owners who seemed not to care about a club being sucked down a plug hole.
And so the Sky Blues moved to Northampton’s Sixfields Stadium. A lot of fans undertook the 70-mile round trip.
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Then a deal was reached with Sisu, Coventry’s hedge fund owners.
But after a couple of years the owners agreed a contract with Wasps rugby club for the Ricoh, leaving the Sky Blues out on their ear again.
So it was then they began a two-year stint at St Andrew’s, home of Birmingham and one of their great rivals.
There were men who refused to lie down and accept that their club should be shunted around the Midlands.
And in the last four years manager Mark Robins and chief exec Dave Body have teamed up to try to lead the club out of the desperate mess it was in.
Fans in this City of Culture have stood proud as blows fell. And I must say, the supporters’ refusal to let Coventry slide into irrelevance does my heart good.
Their behaviour sometimes strayed into the unacceptable, but it can’t have been much of a pleasure to traipse the roads of the Midlands, angry at the owners’ indifference.
Maybe Coventry have been a little fortunate. In between recent relegations, they have won the EFL Trophy in 2017.
And there was promotion to the Championship last season as the top team in a coronavirus-hit League One with nine matches still to play.
The Sky Blues have earned their luck.
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I am not sure whether this was appreciated by Sisu. They merely boast of record season ticket sales.
And the hedge-funders commented that revenues are “the best the club has had” during their time at the stadium.
It is reported that Coventry have a longer-term goal of constructing a new stadium. Hill would enjoy that riposte.
