Sideways Sammy

It’s a fourth trip to Wembley in the space of seven years for Coventry City, a time period that has seen the club transformed. From being the underdogs in the Checkatrade Trophy with a team largely made up of academy players to beating a Premier League team on their own patch with goals from two strikers the club paid somewhere between £11-15 million to acquire. It has been a journey no-one could have expected in 2017, when the club could easily have ended up languishing in the fourth-tier.

For many Sky Blues fans, the bad times are still prominent in the memory. Not just the administration and two periods in exile but the years of steady decline that had set in from the club’s desperate attempts to stay in the top-flight in the 90s. Every year, things seemed to get slightly and steadily worse. Any run of good form was short-lived and accidental. Any half-decent player was quick to leave. Whether at Highfield Road or the Ricoh Arena, the atmosphere at games was drab and apathetic. The club was only going in one direction and the only question was whether anyone would be around to care when it was put out of its misery.

That first trip to Wembley in this run, back in 2017, demonstrated just how desperate fans were for any taste of success. Fans flooded onto the pitch after Russell Slade’s Sky Blues edged past Wycombe Wanderers to seal their place in the Checktrade Trophy final. 43,000 tickets were sold, in a campaign where Coventry City averaged just over 9,000 for their league matches, to watch a team that were all but doomed to relegation to the bottom tier of the Football League and heavy underdogs against Oxford United.

It looked to be a day to celebrate what Coventry City had the potential to be if only they weren’t owned by a group that had little interest in success on the pitch, if only they weren’t in the middle of a legal and political battle as to their status in their home city, if only the club wasn’t cursed to failure as part of some Mephistophelean pact that an older generation had made to preserve top-flight status for an extended period. The result didn’t really matter, it was what appeared to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to demonstrate that the Sky Blues were a real football club.

And then the team won the game.

That could well have been the turning point in Coventry City’s history. Those goals from Gael Bigirimana and George Thomas, that ludicrous late save from Lee Burge, seeing Jordan Willis lift the trophy in front of a sea of Sky Blue at Wembley. That was the first inkling that Coventry fans were given that success as a football club is possible.

The four teams that have made it to Wembley have little in common, save for the badge on their shirt. The academy kids that won the Checkatrade Trophy, the experienced outfit that got the club out of League Two, the star power of Viktor Gyokeres and Gustavo Hamer that so nearly delivered Premier League football to this team, possibly the most expensively-assembled team in the club’s history. The one through line has been, of course, Mark Robins.

It is getting harder and harder to deny that the man may be the best manager in the club’s history. The only competition is Jimmy Hill, who won two promotions, getting the club into the top-flight for the first and only time, and is the progenitor of at least two iconic elements of the club’s identity in the Sky Blue kit and the Sky Blue Song. Mark Robins has managed Coventry City for longer than Hill, won a trophy on top of those two promotions and could soon deliver a third in an era where the gaps between the divisions are far more stark.

The thought that Coventry City could even get back into the Championship, let alone challenge for promotion out of it seemed ludicrous as recently as four seasons ago. The club had largely dined on a diet of free transfers and loans for much of its time out of the top-flight and the Championship had become a division where teams had to spend millions just to keep up with the competition. Under Mark Robins’ management, the Sky Blues have gone from living hand-to-mouth in the lower divisions to being one of the big spenders in a money league, fuelled by selling players he helped develop into stars.

The transformation from that first Wembley trip to this upcoming one would have been unthinkable back in 2017, Mark Robins has made that progression seem natural. From bringing in the right experience in League Two, to building around players who could be developed and sold on to get out of both League One and establish the club in the Championship to now, spending good money on players to play their prime years at Coventry City, Robins laid the foundations for this run of success and each new tier of this Sky Blue tower has seamlessly slotted on top of the other.

Coventry City fans have learned from gruesome experience that the pastime of supporting a football club can be largely a subtractive experience. The vast majority of teams fail to achieve anything in a season and fans are often powerless to do anything other than watch others enjoy success. That’s what makes it so sweet when it comes around to your team, because the pain of defeat is so bitter, because the odds are against your team achieving anything in a given season.

That’s why it’s so important to enjoy these good times. There is no guarantee they will continue. This feeling will have to sustain us through the lean years. There was a time not so long ago where even the vaguest hint of success did not look possible for Coventry City, where a cup competition for third and fourth-tier clubs (plus under-21 teams of the richest) seemed the most shimmering piece of silverware. This, right now, is a golden era for this football club. Let’s enjoy every second of it.