Three Games, Three Defeats, No Goals For....
By CovSid67
October 24 2007
Just what is the point of supporting Coventry City anymore? It's becoming quite clear the majority of the people of Coventry do not care about Coventry City, though you can bet your last dollar they'll moan like hell if the club do go out of business.
Despite a call for supporters to help the club in their hour of need (Hour? It seems like decades!), a pathetic 17,000 bothered to raise themselves from the comfort of their armchairs (A few of those being Watford fans too). With Champions League football on TV - including a 4-2 win for Manchester United, and an awesome display from Arsenal, who won 7-0 - I guess it's not difficult to see why people might have opted for quality over Coventry.
The early season promise has disappeared (Whatever happened to our free-scoring strikers?), and with every passing day comes more bad news. Despite Andy Marshall's decent enough form, the club were looking to bring in Casper Schmichael from Manchester City, until a transfer embargo scuppered said plan, while Iain Dowie was linked with a move to Bolton to fill Sammy Lee's tiny shoes. And going into administration will happen if we don't find a buyer before Christmas. You know what to put on your Christmas list kiddies....
Watford weren't particularly good, but they didn't really need to move out of second gear to win this match with ease. The home side simply didn't turn up. And neither did our vocal support (I was at a funeral last Friday which had more crowd noise!).
Goal one came minutes after a re-shuffle of the Coventry defence, with Borrowdale having been stretchered off. Dropping Gray to left-back and bringing Tabb on would have been my choice - sadly it wasn't Iain Dowie's. De Zeeuw came on, forcing Turner to play out of position at left-back, and once again De Zeeuw and Ward played like strangers. It was Turner's error, followed by the central defenders decision to leave the ball, followed by an Osbourne slip, that allowed Johnson to score. Replays would suggest Marshall made himself smaller, rather than bigger, as he failed to stop the shot.
Goal two came three minutes (Plus five minutes injury time!) before half-time, soon after a Gray effort went fairly wide, and a Kyle header missed too, and came as the result of De Zeeuw allowing King to much time and space in the area. Coming back from one-down looked unlikely, so trying to come back from two was never going to happen.
Half-time saw another substitution, with McNamee dropping to right-back, Osbourne filling the injured Hughes' shoes, and Simpson coming on to play right midfield. Simpson proved to be one of the only plus points of another disappointing evening.
Just to make sure, Henderson finished the game as a contest within a minute or two of the second half starting. De Zeeuw was again found wanting, and the player I thought could be the missing piece of any potential Top 6 team jigsaw looks more likely to take us into the bottom six - that's presuming we're still in existence come the end of the season.
There were a few good minutes for the home side, with two decent chances scrambled clear within seconds, and another effort going the same way soon after, but this was dire (Kyle and Mifsud being the unlucky two).
One or two supporters did try to start the singing, but the majority of the home supporters seem resigned to the fact the club is in a hole it doesn't look able to climb out of. An £8,000,000 wage bill, for players that look worthy of only a fraction of that amount per season, is just part of the problem. Another is simply that not enough people care....
TEAM: Marshall, Osbourne, Borrowdale (De Zeeuw 25), Ward, Turner, McNamee, Doyle, S. Hughes (Simpson 46), Gray (Best 71), Kyle, Mifsud. SNU: Adebola, Tabb.
`Fair-to-middling players around the country will be spared the spectre of being exiled to the concrete-tastic hellhole that is Coventry, now that the Sky Blues have been handed a big sheet of paper with "transfer embargo" stamped on it in huge red letters. It seems they've been having trouble paying for the players they've already bought, you see' - Sh*tty tea-time email GuardianUnlimited.