Fan-tastic occasion whets the appetite for replay cracker
THE games are coming thick and fast for the Sky Blues and February promises to be a crucial month with seven firstteam games including today’s match at Bristol Rovers. Home games against fellow promotion contenders Portsmouth and Rotherham are real six-pointers and City need to keep their momentum up with hopefully less draws and more victories.
What a great atmosphere at St Andrew’s last week for the FA Cup tie and it promises to be similar on Tuesday night under the lights in the replay. The attendance at last week’s game was restricted due to safety and police guidance but numbered a healthy 21,193.
There were 11,728 Coventry fans, the highest number to watch the team outside Coventry other than at Wembley since the FA Cup semi-final at Hillsborough in 1987 when 25,000 were present. The Blues contingent was impressive too – with 9,465 ‘away’ fans the largest away following at a City game since Highfield Road was made all-seater in 1981. Earlier that year there were an estimated 10,000 West Ham fans for the first leg of the League Cup semi-final.
Coventry City will be playing their seventh game in this season’s FA Cup on Tuesday night – the most they have played in the competition in a single season since the famous 1962-63 run when the club played nine games in reaching the quarter-finals as a Third Division club.
THE drawn game against Birmingham meant that the club have had three successive ties with replays something that has only happened once before, in 1974.
That season City beat Sheffield Wednesday 3-1 in round three after a 0-0 draw at Hillsborough, beat Derby 1-0 after a 0-0 draw at Highfield Road but lost in round five, 3-2 at QPR, after a 0-0 draw at Coventry.
AFTER the Blues Cup game I had the pleasure of meeting former City player Jim Hagan who was over in the UK for a rare visit from his home in southern Spain.
Jim, now aged 63, made only 19 appearances for the Sky Blues between 1978-82 before joining Birmingham and playing more than 150 games for the Bluenoses.
A central defender, most of Jim’s games in Sky Blue came in 1978-79 when he stood in for Gary Gillespie and partnered Jim Holton at the back. The Northern Irishman went to Torquay on loan in 1979-80 and then had spells with Seiko in Hong Kong and Jimmy Hill’s US teams, Detroit Express and Washington Diplomats.
Hagan returned to Highfield Road in 1981 and was a regular in the reserves but couldn’t win a regular first team place because of the form of Gillespie and Paul Dyson. His final game for the club was an FA Cup sixth-round defeat at West Brom in March 1982 and he moved to St Andrew’s that summer.
I managed to introduce him to Coventry City Former Players Association president Kirk Stephens and they discovered they have homes a few miles apart on the Costa del Sol.
Another reunion occurred with Harry Roberts (another who played for both the Sky Blues and the Blues) and the two reminisced about lift-sharing to Birmingham in the 1980s.