Coventry City: One of the great football comebacks you may have missed

Alan Granville is a Travel Reporter for Stuff but is also a Coventry City tragic

OPINION: There’s been a boom lately in sports documentaries. Drive To Survive has shone a spotlight onto Formula 1, The Last Dance followed Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls while a wide variety of football teams, from Arsenal, Manchester City and Juventus down to non-league Wrexham have been tracked by cameras recording their every move.

But I reckon those documentary makers have missed out on one team who have been a major drama llama this season, a side with enough cliffhangers to fill a Netflix 10-parter, and one that could end up with an unlikely place back in the English top flight. Welcome to Coventry City.

This season the Sky Blues have seen, (deep breath) home games at the start of the season postponed due to the pitch being destroyed because of the rugby sevens at the Commonwealth Games; the threat of a points deduction because of said pitch even though it wasn’t their fault; a major falling out (again) with the owners of stadium – the rugby team Wasps, who then go bankrupt; City start without a single win in the first seven matches to sit rooted at the bottom of the table; a top player sold possibly to pay for a new playing surface to replace the one they didn’t ruin in the first place; the stadium gets bought by a billionaire who serves the club an eviction notice; a new owner appears from nowhere to take over; and the distributor of Coventry’s football kit and replicas goes into administration … just before Christmas. Oh, and there was a transfer embargo too.

That was only the first few months of the season.

And yet despite everything thrown at them, Coventry currently sit an unlikely fifth in the Championship table, just one point from sealing a play-off place and a step closer to a return to the top flight more than two decades after they were relegated.

Tough love

To be a Coventry fan there needs to be some element of being a masochist.

My journey started in the early 80s and was inspired by my father’s love of the underdog, and Coventry were certainly one of them. Bar the odd highlight, the club seemed to be mired in mid-table or revel in unlikely escapes on the last day of the season. I had no connection to the city or club, but it was that fighting spirit that aligned them with me.

As a kid growing up in Ireland, I don’t think I ever met another Coventry fan, certainly not in my school, and most Mondays I’d trudge into class knowing I’d face a barrage of abuse from the likes of Liverpool and Manchester United fans.

Then a miracle happened – we won the FA Cup. May 16, 1987 will be forever etched into my memory as Coventry’s ragtag bunch of journeymen defeated the much-more fancied Tottenham Hotspur 3-2 in extra-time in one of the best finals ever at Wembley. They had finished 10th in the league that season, a place they’d repeat a year later before their highest placing since 1970, coming in seventh.

That has proved to be somewhat of the glory years, as the downwards slide started. As the old First Division became the Premier League in 1992-93 and TV money washed into football, Coventry could never quite crack a place in the upper echelons. They never finished higher than 11th before the inevitable happened – relegation in 2001, ending 34 years in the top flight.

The next few years will feel very long for fans. The club just couldn’t get back into the Premier League and the rot had started to set in. They had sold their previous ground of Highfield Road and moved into a shiny new stadium, but crucially they didn’t own it. In 2007, they were minutes from going bust, but a hedge fund called SISU stepped in to take over. However, they went from saviours to pariahs as repeated calls for investment failed. The club continued to free-fall, relegation again in 2012, administration a year later, kicked out of the stadium before the 2013-14 season.

With home games being played nearly 60km away in Northampton, many fans boycotted. It was a mess. Despite an eventual return to their home stadium, now owned by Wasps RFC, they were relegated to the bottom division in 2017, the first time they’d been this low since 1959.

But in their midst, the hero of the hour had already emerged.

Robins era

Mark Robins was a handy striker in his day, playing for the likes of Manchester United, Norwich and Leicester. His move into football management started in 2007 with Rotherham before his first spell with Coventry in 2012, guiding them from the relegation zone to close to the play-offs. On his return in 2017 he found a club on the precipice of relegation to League Two and even though the inevitable happened, he went about transforming the club. It worked.

Coventry spent just a year in the lowest division, promoted via the play-offs, and two seasons later they finished top of League One in the Covid-hit season of 2019-20, a second promotion in three years. That was despite some off field dramas (naturally). Another falling out with Wasps saw the club play home games up the road in Birmingham – they returned to Coventry in 2021. On the field, a couple of consolidation years followed in the Championship before this year’s blazing play-off push.

Helped by the 21 goals of Viktor Gyökeres, Robins has fashioned a resilient side despite having one of the smallest playing budgets in the league. His team consists of a couple of local lads, some smart young players brought in on loan and a handful of paid-for stars, including Gyökeres, a now-£1million (NZ$2m) steal from Brighton.

It hasn’t all gone to plan on the field since those troubling early weeks of the season. Coventry will be beaming onto screens around the world soon but not in a way they would like, after losing at home to Wrexham in the FA Cup and a guaranteed showing on the next Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney Disney+ series.

The tiny squad has been hampered by injuries, not least to fan favourite and midfield talisman Callum O’Hare who has been out since December with a knee injury, but somehow the players have left all the off-field traumas behind. A run of just one loss in 16 games shows they have peaked at the right time.

But I won’t be getting ahead of myself. The words: success, hope and Coventry CIty have rarely been in the same sentence over the last couple of decades, and there are plenty of twists and turns still ahead of us. If we go up, will we be hammered every week? If we don’t, will all our players and manager be poached?

The final game of the regular season takes place on Tuesday morning (NZT) against Middlesbrough. All Coventry need is a draw to reach the play-offs. But whatever happens, it’s nice to dare to dream again. To see a team rise once more. A moment that really should be captured on film.