Coventry City has suffered a major embarrassment.
The cancellation of Coventry City was an avoidable embarrassment for virtually everyone involved.
Coventry City and Rotherham United fans were left high and dry on Saturday evening after Coventry’s pitch was declared unusable.
So it’s the start of the new season and over the weekend, for the first time, there was an almost complete set of results to pore over. Everyone in the EFL has now played two games. Everybody except for two clubs, that is.
The match between Coventry City and Rotherham United became one of the earliest match postponements in the history of English football on Saturday evening, after the pitch at the Coventry Building Society Arena was declared unplayable and unsafe.
Coventry City are tenants of the Arena, and the story of their relationship with this stadium is one of the most fractious around. Built to replace Highfield Road in 2005, the Arena has never been fully owned by the club, being originally owned by Arena Coventry Limited (ACL), a group jointly owned by Coventry City Council and the Higgs Charity.
In 2012 the club’s owners, a hedge fund called Sisu, entered into a rent dispute which placed Coventry City into administration and forced them to move out of the Arena to play their home matches at Northampton Town’s Sixfields.
Agreement was reached for them to return in 2014, but the club moved out again in 2019 after a failure to reach terms at the end of their five-year agreement. But by this time Coventry City were no longer dealing with ACL. The stadium owners had sold out to the Wasps rugby union club, who moved from High Wycombe to Coventry to take up residence there.
After two years away, agreement was finally reached for Coventry City, whose owners have spent ages talking about building the club a new stadium with little having come of it, to return last year.
Over the course of this time, Coventry City supporters were put through the wringer. Their club had spent 34 consecutive seasons in the top flight between 1967 and 2001. By 2017, they were in League Two, amid an increasingly fractious atmosphere within the club’ fanbase, as the years of bad football, financial problems and ground issues slowly built up.
But through all of these very dark times, the team did eventually manage to get its house in order. Coventry only spent one year in League Two and were promoted via the play-offs, beating Exeter City at Wembley in front of a crowd of 50,000.
Two years later they were back in the Championship as champions of League One. They’ve slowly consolidated with two mid-table Championship finishes since.
This revival has come about under the managership of Mark Robins, and Coventry supporters had reason to be optimistic ahead of the new season. They started with an encouraging 1-1 draw at Sunderland. But this issue over the pitch at The Arena has now thrown something of a cloud over that bright start.
The reason for it is straightforward enough. The Arena’s pitch has been used for rugby sevens matches during the Commonwealth Games, and this has meant that not only has nothing been done to it in terms of re-seeding following the wear and tear of last season, but the pitch has also been further damaged by repeated use during the games this summer
Coventry City supporters have been short-changed enough over the last decade. They deserve a full explanation and apology after having been severely let down, as have travelling supporters from Rotherham United. Those who are now unable to make the fixture or have already paid for train tickets or had made other arrangements deserve full financial restitution.
There may well be an argument brewing over whose fault this debacle was and is. That’s all to follow, but we already know whose fault it wasn’t: the supporters. Some will be wondering, and not for the first time, for whose benefit these matches are even organised in the first place.
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