Ernie Hunt's Sideburns: The Missing Contribution! - p1.
If cigarette packets carry a health warning, then I think it's only fair that Coventry City season tickets do too, as I'm fairly convinced that frequent visits to Highfield Road can shorten life expectancy! I also think that if anybody could discover how to create chocolate bar style packets of fingernails, CCFC supporters would buy them by the bucket-load come April most seasons - as business ideas go, that would be a real winner around Highfield Road! I sometimes wonder if the reason I still support CCFC is because I have the memory of a goldfish, and quite remember just how many times they have `put me through it' with those final games of the season....
If our stay in the top flight has hardly ever seen us pull up trees as far as giving the top clubs a run for their money and attempting to prise the Division One/Premiership trophy from their grasp, our attempts in the cup competitions haven't been a lot better either! From being beaten 2-1 by (The Mighty) Kings Lynn in the 1961-2 season (Though if you look in `Coventry City - A Complete Record', it actually says we won 1-2! To embarrassed to admit the truth...!), 2-1 again by Sutton in 1988-9, 1-0 by Northampton a year later, even as far back as 1901-2 we were a disaster - being routed 11-2 by Berwick Rangers! But at least we made it to Wembley once!
My main memory of that season was not the final itself, it was the semi-final (surley one of the best games ever seen in football anywhere across the world (and beyond!)), and the streets from the motorway all the way into town after the coaches came back from the game against Leeds. They were lined with people that probably normally didn't give a monkeys about CCFC (If even a small percentage of them did, then I can't for the life of me understand why the ground isn't full for every game....), all waving banners and applauding as each coach went past - it reduced me to tears! And if it wasn't for the fact that i'm a bloke, and blokes don't blub, I would have cried like a baby!! (My eyes are streaming now recalling it!!). After that day, we were never going to lose the final, were we?!
Gordon Strachan has arrested the decline slightly in recent seasons, but still we fail to deliver what is expected with the players he has at his disposal. I've said for a long time that if we had Barcelona's ground and average crowd (110,000?), with the best players Europe (And beyond!) has to offer, we would still find a way to mess things up horrendously! A typical example of CCFC could be found during their match with QPR in 1933. The team raced to a massive 7-0 half-time lead, then failed to score again in the second half! (Note: I am not that much of an anorak that I know every CCFC result, scorer, whatever, ever! I stumbled across that fact purely by accident while writing this....). We just never seem able to build on situations when we give ourselves a good platform....
Despite this, I have still supported the mighty CCFC for an unbroken spell of 34 years (Despite only having been on this earth for 33! I was told I was even cheering for CCFC while in the womb....!), and always will too. In that time, we've had more close shaves than Victor Kayam, more (potential) launch-pads than NASA, and, had CCFC been a patient on a life-support machine, it would have been advised by doctors to switch it off on a number of occassions (Thanks to `Cliches-Are-Us' for helping out with that last sentence....) - possibly twenty-five times in the last thirty-three years! My love for CCFC has, and never will, waver though. While other friends have changed their allegiances to Forest/Liverpool/Manchester United/whoever else was top of the league that week (though in their defence, I can't remember many (if any at all) switching to the Villa!), I always stayed loyal, as most CCFC fans seem to do - as that (bloody awful) song says, `It's For Life'! (Though as my solicitor once (never) told me, `you would only have got five years for burglary'!!).
We'll never know how massive CCFC could have been had they taken their rightful place in European competition in the 1987/8 season - we could have become bigger than Barcelona! (Don't worry, I don't really believe that either....!). It was just typical of CCFC to win a major trophy at a time when English clubs were banned from Europe (and just my brothers luck to be more than a bus-ride away from Coventry/Wembley for the first time in his life when we got through to the Cup Final, for the first time in ours!!). However massive CCFC become in the future (please!), and however many trophies we win (please!), I think the 1986/87 team will always be remembered as the finest. The players weren't the best to turn-out for CCFC, but their attitude was first class! Houchen's cup-final goal (the best goal ever at Wembley! - Not just my opinion, the legendary Brian Moore's too!!) and Sillett's smile and (embarrassing uncle style) dance represented everything that's great about football. Those memories still bring tears to my eyes too....
That we have managed to stay in the top-flight while teams as (supposedly) mighty as Leeds United, Newcastle, Chelsea, Tottenham, Aston Villa, and of course, Manchester United surely deserves some credit, doesn't it?! We have never been able to match these teams financially, have always had smaller crowds, have always been regarded as less glamorous, but we do have the one thing that none of those teams have - an unbroken record in the top-flight. Long may it continue! And while I would never dream of being smug, as - like most CCFC supporters - we know that as soon as we get complacent about surviving, the unthinkable will happen! But it sometimes seems to me that if we needed 4 points from our last game of the season then we would somehow get them....
The hatred towards us by so-called experts is venomous though! Rodney Marsh hasn't ever had a good word to say about us, and it has been reported that certain journalists request to cover CCFC's final match of the season so they can `finally see us relegated'! Match of the Day, almost without fail, leave us `til last on their programme. And Central News only ever comment on CCFC when we've lost, or when another (so-called) star has left us (usually for a life of obscurity in a top sides' reserve team, before being sold off cheaply to a Division One team two years later....). Mike Channon once said of CCFC (the year we needed to beat Stoke, Luton, and champions elect Everton to survive) that `if they win their last three matches then they deserve to stay up' - not for one minute believing we would ever do it! We did, and to this day he's never forgiven us! (Mainly because our survival saw his beloved Norwich relegated....). And Millwall fans think nobody likes them....!
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