“We have to make the best of it right now, we are”
SKY BLUES BOSS MARK ROBINS ON THEIR ‘HOME’ FORM
COVENTRY boss Mark Robins admits he had to work on his players to get them prepared for 46 ‘away’ games this season.
He won’t divulge how he went about it or what was said, but it’s working. It’s nearly half a century since the Sky Blues have had a ‘home’ start as good as this.
Their foster home at Birmingham City has brought five successive league wins - the best the Sky Blues have done since Gordon Milne was manager in 1973 and they enjoyed victories over Spurs, Liverpool, Southampton, Manchester City and Derby.
Southend, Bristol Rovers, Gillingham, Blackpool and Wimbledon aren’t in the same class as the ’73 victories, but add in Exeter in the Carabao Cup and Walsall (on penalties) in the Leasing.com Trophy and that’s seven games at St Andrew’s and seven wins.
Coventry had a break yesterday because they were due to play away at Bury and next up is Doncaster back in Birmingham.
It’s a nomad’s life for the Sky Blues.
Their dispute with Wasps is still unresolved and the tenants of the Ricoh Stadium have in effect been evicted.
There’s a suggestion that Coventry are paying £1.4m for the season to rent Birmingham City’s ground. That seems high, but, then again, their rent at the Ricoh was £1.28m a year, something a club that had fallen from the Premier League to League Two could not afford.
Dispute
Robins has brought the club back from that low to the top of League One going into yesterday’s games and Championship football for a club without a home is on the agenda.
Coventry have a club psychologist, paid for, it’s thought, out of the personal pocket of Joy Seppala, who runs the Sky Blues for hedgefund owners Sisu Capital.
If that is true then it’s a remarkable turn around by Seppala, who has been hounded by fans for the way the football club has been run.
There is a new optimism about Coventry this season, the Sky is a little Bluer.
The 20-mile journey from Cov to Birmingham can take an hour and a half - or a whole game - through the constant M6 roadworks or clogged-up A45.
It kept the crowd down to 5,239, the lowest league gate of the season, on Tuesday night when Coventry beat AFC Wimbledon with a goal three minutes into added time.
If the heads of Coventry Council, Wasps and Sisu were banged together and the Sky Blues, unbeaten in the league, top and sweeping all before them, were playing at the Ricoh they’d have upwards of 12,000 in there.
Robins, a pragmatic man, can only make the best of the situation he has been given.
Asked if psychological work had been done on the players after being forced to up sticks and drive down the road, Robins, right, said: “We’ve not really had to do a great deal although, yes, we’ve done some things. But this happened really quickly don’t forget.
“If you wanted to make a big thing out of it then you could, but we chose not to.
“What kind of things have we done? That would be telling. We’ve worked hard with the players. The fact is we’ve come, we are here.
“The pitch at Birmingham is really good. They have looked after us, Birmingham City make us feel welcome every time we come. It’s a good football club to play at.
“We’ve got a set of circumstances and we have to make the best of it. At the moment we are. This is a tough, tough league and if you take your foot off the gas you come unstuck.”
Aside from Bury and Bolton, no-one has had it tougher in League One than the homeless Sky Blues. “If you want to put mental barriers, mental blocks in the way then you can, but take them away, free the shackles. This is our home so these are home games for us,” adds Robins. Coventry have been this way before, playing at Northampton for season 2013-14, in the early part of this unholy row that has divisions as deep as Brexit. In the first five home games of that grim season Coventry won three, drew one and lost one. Gates were just over 2,000 dropping to 1,700. There were almost as many Cov fans outside Sixfields Stadium, howling, whistling and protesting, as there were inside. Callum Wilson, now of England but born in Coventry, was the only antidote to the gloom with 21 league goals as the Sky Blues finished 18th in League One, four points clear of relegation.
They went down to League Two a couple of years ago and since then Robins has begun the rebuild.
Rebuild
Robins and his players are having a breather this weekend, taking stock of where they are, what they’ve done, what they need to do and getting the gear ready to load up and take to Birmingham again for the next ‘home’ match.
If they can beat Doncaster, Tranmere and Fleetwood, Coventry’s next three home fixtures, then Robins will equal the next Sky Blues stat on the list.
Winning their first eight successive home games would equal the runs of 1935 in Division Three South and 1950 in Division Two.
But those teams weren’t gypsies, this team is.
There’s little to tell you at StAndrew’s that Coventry are at home.
There is some branding in the new main stand, Pat Raybould puts together her family zone and kit suppliers Hummel have bright, electrified advertising boards.
Half of St Andrew’s is shut, the new Main Stand houses Coventry’s fans and the stand behind the goal at the railway end has the opposition. It’s not that dissimilar to the Ricoh, to be honest.
There was depressingly little CCFC branding there either, all Coventry related stuff could only be on show six hours before a game and had to be dismantled no later than six hours afterwards. At least there’s a storeroom at Birmingham
where those advertising boards you see behind managers and players can be stored and not stuffed in a car to take back.
“We should never have left Highfield Road,” says Mickey Gynn, right, who played 300 games for Coventry in 10 years, the most memorable year and game being winning the FA Cup in 1987.
The old ground is now a housing estate. “Why the hell we left I’ll never know,” he said. “Not owning the stadium we went to, the Ricoh, is beyond belief. “We were getting too big for our boots I think. Highfield Road, we should still be there and we might be in a higher division.
“Even in the Ricoh, with 10,000, 12,000 in, it was sparse. At least here at Birmingham we’ve got 5,000, 6,000 Coventry fans together making some good noise.
Sparse
“Speaking as a player, I don’t think it matters where you play as long as you are getting paid and have a good team spirit.” There was hope that peace might break out and Coventry would go back to the Ricoh this year. But that looks scuppered by the state of the pitch. Torn up by rugby, it’s been relaid and has yet to knit properly, making it likely the EFL would reject the surface as unfit.
What Coventry are benefiting from is the superb playing surface at Birmingham which suits the flowing football Robins likes.
“There is plenty of scope for us to get better, plenty of work to be done,” says Robins. “We will improve.” There is another theory. Ron Saunders, with his crosses on the dressing room floor, Barry Fry, peeing in all four corners of the pitch, Holy Water sprinkled in the dugout, have all been used to lift a gypsy’s curse dating back 113 years.
Maybe they failed. Maybe the old Romany is having a laugh, blessing Cov with win after win at St Andrew’s while Birmingham struggled along with two going into yesterday?
We should never have left Highfield Road. We should still be there and we might be in a higher division Mickey Gynn