Coventry City's start to the season has been thrown into chaos by the pitch debacle at the CBS Arena following the Commonwealth Games Rugby Sevens tournament. Last Sunday's opening home game against Rotherham was called off at short notice and ever since we have had a undignified and unhelpful war of words between the parties. Somehow the club managed to organise for the Carabao (League) Cup game with Bristol City to take place at Burton Albion's Pirelli Stadium on Wednesday evening.
This was only the second match ever called off at the Arena since it opened in 2005, and the first because of the state of the pitch. Bristol City became the first team to play away games against City at five different locations as they have previously played at both Sixfields and St Andrews.
Meanwhile Mark Robins's team will be playing catch up with the rest of the division until they can rearrange the Rotherham game and we have to hope that the next two home games can go ahead or that catch up will be increased. The situation is not dissimilar to the 1968-69 season when the club's new Main Stand wasn't ready for the start of the campaign and the club had to call off the first two home games and then start with two away games, both which were lost. So after every other club had played four games City had played just two and were bottom of the table. The club struggled to get out of the relegation zone all season and only avoided relegation because Leicester City had a massive fixture backlog as a result of weather and an FA Cup run. Let's hope that the Arena pitch is fit to play on soon and that the team can deal with what sounds like it will be an inferior playing surface.
The League Cup game went ahead in Burton but turned into a nightmare with a pumped up Bristol team thumping a City team, largely made up of fringe players, for an easy passage to the second round. The first half performance was abysmal and although things improved after half-time the final scoreline of 4-1 didn't flatter Bristol. It was the club's worst home defeat in the competition since 1964 when Leicester City thumped Jimmy Hill's side 8-1. There were some mitigating circumstances that night – captain George Curtis had to leave the field injured before half-time and there were no substitutes in those days plus the fact that Leicester were a top six First Division side and had their best team in their pre-2016 history.
The club's fans travelled in good numbers and good humour to Burton on a beautiful evening and the crowd, with just a few hundred away fans, was 2,680. The club have had lower home crowds in the competition at Sixfields and St Andrews but the receipts will probably be a quarter of what they could have expected at the CBS and the hire of Burton's facilities will make it a loss-making event. With valuable income lost with the Rotherham postponement one has to worry that one of the club's top players will have to be sold before the transfer window closes to fill the inevitable shortfall of cash.
The competition has been extremely unproductive for City in recent years – it was the seventh time in the last ten seasons that they have exited the competition. It is now 15 years since the club last progressed beyond the third round – the year they won at Old Trafford and only once since then have they reached the third round! The Sky Blues are not alone – 19 Championship clubs played in the competition this week and all but four were eliminated, the majority to clubs from the lower divisions. This suggests that Championship clubs are so focused on the league campaign and gaining promotion to the Premier League that they have little or no interest in the competition even though there is the lure of big pay days if they draw one of the big clubs later in the competition. Sadly it seems the League Cup is on its last legs and that will mean that smaller clubs will lose their opportunity of financial windfalls and exciting giant-killing exploits and all because of the greed of the bigger clubs.
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