Walsall fan in peace.
Firstly - agree that any blitz comments are out of order - a misjudged and misguided attempt at humour.
At Walsall we're quite well versed on football finances and in between the attempts at "bantz" on UpTheSaddlers I'd urge you to read the contributions of say Bangsection who is very erudite on the subject.
We don't have a beef with Coventry per se and would usually be as indifferent to you as you would be to us. We share a pretend county but really have no reason to love or loathe eachother. The issue is with clubs who sell their fans, their communities and the very essence of the game and sport in general down the river in an often vain attempt to suck on the ugly tit that is the Premiership. The Premiership, Premier League or whatever is as real a competition as the West Midlands is a county. It is a sporting aboration and is the very opposite of sport, fairness and community. And yet clubs and their sleep-walking supporters mortgage their finances and their dreams upon reaching it, often with the sole objective once there to finish fourth bottom - year after year after year. The only people winning are players who financially gain from the massive telly money and owners who sell equity on the basis of that money. The real football fan? Often forgotten or priced out as the richer, star struck casual fan rocks up to swell the coffers even more.
What often happens is that these clubs don't reach the Premiership and often fall the other way out of The Championship, but then forget that they are now third division clubs with shambolic finances. This is accompanied by a fan base that scoffs at the "tin-pot" entities that they now have to face every week, no doubt reminding themselves that they should be playing at Old Trafford rather than the Bescot. Whilst not paying whatever bills they should be paying they continue to assemble teams on a budget that would be the envy of most at the level whilst seeking sympathy for their new found status and plight.
We've seen it time after time. Leeds (biggest disgrace of the lot), Sheff W, Forest, Leicester, Southampton, Pompey and now yourselves. We are tenants in our ground too. We pay £425,000 a year rent. A third of yours, but given that our tin-pot fan base is around a third of your massive one, the sums are quite easy to do to get to a point of rough equilibrium. We aren't happy with not owning the free-hold to our ground, and the sale of Fellows Park which we owned, to pay for a stadium into which we became tenants, still rankles. Some longstanding Walsall fans still won't attend because of this. But the point is we pay the rent, we pay all the other bills that come our way and we build a team based upon whatever is left over, thus ensuring we always have a team to support.
Of course we'd like to push the boat out and sign more expensive players, live the dream and "go for it" but at the same time enjoy supporting a club that represents its town and its community in a dignified, if humble manner.
So there isn't a sudden and irrational hatred of Coventry. It's just the reaction to another "big" club conducting its affairs in shambolic fashion on the back of a vain hope to join a so-called elite and giving the impression that they're slumming it at our level and trying to find every conceivable loop-hole to wriggle out of its obligations. The up-shot of that is that our league becomes less of a level playing field and clubs like ours (and indeed Orient who are similar to us in many ways) feel a little cheated.
So no hard feelings, I hope you get it sorted in the right way. You are miles from being the worst offenders in this regard and you don't seem to be leaving the tax payer or local businesses in the lurch which immediately elevates you above some of those I mentioned above.
Oh - and Pete Waterman - legend for his early Specials-doesn't really watch us anymore