Coventry were just half an hour from closure
AS a supporter, player, captain, coach and leading club official, Peter Rossborough has been through the good times and bad with Coventry RFC over six decades.
A first-team player in his late teens and now club president for the last dozen years, the former England full-back has pretty much seen it all, from the glory years of the 60s and 70s, when Coventry ruled the roost in English rugby, to the time when the club almost shut up shop.
Like many of his generation, his love affair with rugby, and subsequently his hometown club, only began when the round-ball had been kicked into touch.
“When I was a young lad at junior school I was madly into soccer, but then I took the 11plus and, against all expectations, I passed and went to King Henry VIII Grammar School, a rugby-playing school,” he explained.
“Resisting at first, I got stuck into it and I made my first appearance at Coundon Road as a 12-year-old at a schools’ tournament.”
Rossborough went on to grace Coventry’s famous old pitch just shy of 400 times in the blue and white hoops, having made his club debut in the 1967/68 season while still at Durham University.
“Coventry were a different team then, they were one of the best club teams in Great Britain and Europe, and I suspect the world.
“We were up there with the best New Zealand and Australian teams and certainly the best French teams. We were one of the few English teams to play in France, as well as Scotland, Ireland and Wales.
“It was an easy journey on a Wednesday evening or a Saturday to go down to the valleys and then have a quick punch-up against Maesteg or Pontypool and then drown your sorrows, in the most part, after the game as you didn’t get much change out of Welsh referees.”
With a side laden with England internationals such as David Duckham, Peter Jackson, Peter Preece, Fran Cotton and
Rossborough, Coventry won back-to-back RFU Knockout Cup competitions in 1974-75 as they regularly topped the Daily Telegraph Merit table.
“Virtually every player was an international in their own right, and we’d often take to the field with 13 or 14 in our squad, which was unusual in the amateur days. Apart from Fran Cotton, all of our players came from the Coventry/Warwickshire area; it was a great production line for the county and England team at the time.”
A failure to adapt to the changes in the game in the late 70s and 80s meant that the club were a hostage to their phenomenal success for far too long.
Coventry fared little better with the advent of professionalism and, in 2004, faced a do-ordie match against Wakefield.
The talk was that whoever lost the relegation decider from National One (now the Championship) would go bust. Coventry had just sold Coundon Road and were busy building the Butts Park Arena, but the new stadium was in danger of becoming a white elephant until Shaun Perry sped down the blindside to score arguably the most important try in the club’s history.
Leading a hand-to-mouth existence under the ownership of Keith Fairbrother, Coventry continued to limp along and Rossborough, to this day, finds it difficult to talk about those ‘lost’ years when he stayed away from the club in silent protest at the way things were being run. It went from bad to worse when Andrew Green took on the club and, in 2008, Coventry were within half an hour of disappearing from the map. Rossborough says: “When Andrew Green invited me back to the club to become president, I wasn’t particularly impressed by what I saw; you could see what lay ahead.
“When bankruptcy did hit us, we knew we needed to get a good group of people together which we managed to do, and a lot of them are still involved now. They gave very generously of their own time and money as well as their business acumen. “With our reputation, the RFU were very keen to keep us alive and they gave us a lot of help, but they insisted we had to come up with a £75,000 bond by a certain date (a fortnight) for them to renew our playing license.
“There was absolutely no way we could raise that amount of money in such a short space of time but, at about 7.30 in the evening, around half an hour before the deadline, one of our board members was contacted by an old school friend of his, another former Coventry player, a guy called Chris Millerchip, who had made millions in the US, Paris and London as a legal executive, and he paid the bond.”
Exorcising the ghosts of the Fairbrother/Green era took some time with suppliers reluctant to deal with the club, but when Millerchip sold the lease of the Butts Park Arena to current chairman Jon Sharp, in 2016, it signalled the start of a new and exciting chapter in Coventry’s history.
Promotion back to the Championship was achieved and, more importantly, the club’s reputation began to be rebuilt.
Rossborough says: “Jon is the guy most responsible for the resurgence in the last three to four years. He has put a tremendous amount of energy into the club and a fair bit of his own cash to get us up to fourth in the final league standings, our best finish in 18 years, in only our second season back in the Championship.”
Ultimately, though, Rossborough knows that success must not come at the expense of survival – the club means too much to too many people.
“After home games I go into the clubhouse to join the supporters. Many in the room are lifelong supporters, and their enthusiasm for all things Coventry and the rugby club in particular, is quite moving at times. You get people come up to you afterwards with tears in their eyes with what they have seen.
“There is a tremendous allegiance between the players and supporters, and we are determined to keep it that way, as one club.”
While all rugby clubs have taken a massive financial hit because of the coronavirus, Rossborough, a 71-year-old former headmaster, says everyone involved with Coventry is determined that the club’s future will never be put in jeopardy again.
“At the first meeting of the newly-formed board, we said we would not risk the future of the club, it needed to survive no matter what happened. Obviously, it is very pleasing that we have not only survived but also been reasonably successful.
“We hope to build on that going forward. Having said that, everybody knows that the gulf between the Premiership and the Championship is absolutely huge and there’s only a few clubs that can probably bridge that gap.”