Cod Almighty | Diary

A long shot

22 March 2018

Middle-Aged Diary writes: Town don't play Coventry very often, but the games stick in the mind.

Through the fallow mid-1970s, Coventry provoked mutterings. At the high water mark of the McMenemy years, an armada travelled to Highfield Road for a fourth-round FA Cup tie. Coventry were near the start of their long, largely unobtrusive tenancy in the top flight, but our expectations were still high. Thumb again through your well-thumbed copy of We are Town for Gordon Wilson's evocation of a stirring cup run, the last we'd enjoy for some years.

Though we didn't know it, it was the beginning of the end of an era as the excitement of the fourth division championship gave way to a quiet descent down the third division tables. With not much to celebrate, not much to brood on until the end of the 1970s, no wonder the late award of a penalty to Coventry for a fair tackle outside the area continued to rankle. As Ron Counte recalls, we went down to a moral victory.

Expectations were high again in 1989. When Alan Buckley's fourth-flight team beat Coventry – still in the old first division – in the first leg of a League Cup tie, it hardly felt like a shock, more like a confirmation of what we knew about our potential. With a two-goal lead to defend, once more we turned Coventry black and white for the second leg. But once more our hopes foundered. We'd scarcely entered the ground before Tony Rees was sent off for a stamp and we went down 3-0.

A new Coventry striker was making his debut: Kevin Drinkell, once of Rangers, Norwich, and Grimsby. We knew what was coming, and it came. He opened the scoring with a bicycle kick from the edge of the penalty area, then wheeled away below us. Nowadays, the convention would no doubt be that Drinkell should have ostentatiously refused to celebrate. But the glint in his eye – I know what you are thinking, and I know that you know what I am thinking – said more about his relationship to his hometown club than any shrugging off of a team-mate's congratulations.

In September 2001, Coventry's limpet-like hold on top-flight status had finally weakened. After all the cup games, Coventry and Grimsby met in our first league fixture since 1963. This time it was their expectations that were high. This was the golden age of 'no disrespect to the likes of Grimsby' and Coventry demanded we be swatted aside in their swift return to the Premiership.

We were riding high but scarcely believed our luck. And we got luckier still as the Coventry keeper wandered after a lost ball like a sleepy kitten being taunted with a ball of wool, allowing Phil Jevons to finish superbly into an unguarded net. It was the only goal of the game and it earned Coventry manager Gordon Strachan the sack: the archetypal swinging of the Grimsby Reaper's axe.

We lost the return match. We lost home and away the season after. We lost again in September last year, helped by a refereeing decision that reawakened 44-year-old memories. We're on a 17-match run without a win. We travel on Saturday without expectations; not even much hope. But, like Phil Jevons (and with due acknowledgements to Roger Beard who introduced me to the song), we'll take a long shot if that's all we've got.