lamtara2006
Member
Championship Credentials
I have needed to write this for a while now, to get it off my chest as much as anything. I’m finally doing it because my football team are giving me sleepless nights (yes, I probably don’t have enough to worry about in the real world!). Sunday’s match against Worcester was as bad as any performance in living memory by a Coventry City team, yet it wasn’t an isolated incident in a poor year for our club, despite the return to the Ricoh. Increasingly, I feel let down as a supporter of the team, naturally my reactions are largely emotional. That has led me to try to rationalise what I really expect and hope to see from my team on the pitch. All Sky Blues Supporters want Coventry City to be the best, which is a big ask with all the off-field problems, especially lack of investment and the inability to retain our best players, particularly last summer. So it’s a wish list, starting with the most basic entitlement to things that may be, to some degree, only aspirational at this point. Taken together, I think they are some fundamentals that differentiate Champions from Contenders … and they all begin with ‘C for Coventry’!
This is the minimum that we supporters should be entitled to expect from our team. Competing for possession, working as hard off the ball as on it, a determination not to get beaten and demonstrating the will to win. Is it too much to expect in this day-and-age that footballers should ‘play for the badge’? Maybe, given that there is little loyalty generally from club management to playing staff – for example, the manner as well as the fact of Carl Baker’s disposal still sits uneasy with me. However, the term ‘professional footballer’ should mean more than just getting paid for turning up to games and training. ‘Professionalism’ has to be about having the personal pride to put in a shift, at the end of which you know you have given your best, even if that best was not good enough on the day. We all love a ‘trier’ and equally get rightly annoyed at those who don’t ‘fight till the game is won’.
Fans should also be able to expect that the team and each individual within it performs not just week in week out, but through the course of each match. What grieves me as much as the lack of application seen in many games recently is that we have seen those same players perform to a much better level. How can we turn on a fine performance against Gillingham yet a few weeks later be so thoroughly abject against Worcester? Why did it take until the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] half against Peterborough for the ‘real Coventry City’ to turn up? We looked like world beaters for the first 30 minutes against Crawley, then imploded; we gave it a right go for 15 minutes of the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] half against Crewe having meekly surrendered the game in the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] half. When you know that actually the team and the players in the squad are capable of better, the massive dips in performance feel worse than if we were consistently rubbish. Like the issue of commitment, for me this comes down to a question of attitude.
In part, this is about having a good system and organisation, playing to a plan. Much has been talked recently about how we line up, the much criticised 3-5-2 (or 5-3-2) compared to the traditional 4-4-2. Well we started with the traditional plan on Sunday – how did that work out for us? With the fundamental lack of commitment I’m not sure any formation would make much difference. By the end of the match I couldn’t work out what system we were playing other than ‘headless chickens’. The more important element of cohesion in my opinion is teamwork: players showing for each other; covering in defence; supporting in attack; encouraging and motivating their colleagues on the park. What has concerned me when we have suffered the dips in performance is the lack of movement by players off the ball so that when we have possession there are limited options for the passer. When we are having our better moments, players are running into space and calling for the ball, enabling attacking opportunities to be created. (You could add the term ‘Team Spirit’ under this heading though I was recently reminded of this quote by Steve Archibald of Scotland, Spurs, Barcelona etc.: ‘Team Spirit is an illusion glimpsed only in moments of victory’.)
Good teams impose themselves on weaker opposition and make themselves difficult to beat by superior sides. Much of this is down to ‘looking after the ball’, making sure that you don’t give away easy possession, forcing the opposition to chase the game. It’s a much harder and more energy-sapping game when you are the side with the minority of possession, the probability is that you are going to come out on the wrong side of the score-line. Of course, it means that good teams have to have players with good ball retention skills and/or the ability to find a pass to a player wearing the identical shirt to themselves; and when they do lose the ball, they apply pressure to win it back quickly by closing down and getting in tackles and interceptions.
A really difficult element when a side is on a long run of poor results. Yet individual players have to have self-belief that they are good enough to be playing and succeeding at whatever level, otherwise they will surely fail. Young James Maddison, one of the few positive features from Sunday, demonstrated it in abundance while those around him were letting us down. His run into the 18 yard box which brought our penalty was one of several moments that showed he believed that he deserved to be on that pitch and was better than his opponents. The fact that so many older, more experienced players were nowhere near that level shows not just a lack of confidence, it was an absence of mental strength. ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’ should be a motto rammed home to this group of players, if they can’t live up to it they should ‘get going out of Coventry’. (Of course, self-belief can sometimes be misplaced as Reda showed by wasting Maddison’s good work with the worst penalty fail of 2014.)
I hope and pray that tomorrow night and going forward, we at least see items 1 to 3 from this list. Otherwise I really fear for the future of this club.
I have needed to write this for a while now, to get it off my chest as much as anything. I’m finally doing it because my football team are giving me sleepless nights (yes, I probably don’t have enough to worry about in the real world!). Sunday’s match against Worcester was as bad as any performance in living memory by a Coventry City team, yet it wasn’t an isolated incident in a poor year for our club, despite the return to the Ricoh. Increasingly, I feel let down as a supporter of the team, naturally my reactions are largely emotional. That has led me to try to rationalise what I really expect and hope to see from my team on the pitch. All Sky Blues Supporters want Coventry City to be the best, which is a big ask with all the off-field problems, especially lack of investment and the inability to retain our best players, particularly last summer. So it’s a wish list, starting with the most basic entitlement to things that may be, to some degree, only aspirational at this point. Taken together, I think they are some fundamentals that differentiate Champions from Contenders … and they all begin with ‘C for Coventry’!
- Commitment
This is the minimum that we supporters should be entitled to expect from our team. Competing for possession, working as hard off the ball as on it, a determination not to get beaten and demonstrating the will to win. Is it too much to expect in this day-and-age that footballers should ‘play for the badge’? Maybe, given that there is little loyalty generally from club management to playing staff – for example, the manner as well as the fact of Carl Baker’s disposal still sits uneasy with me. However, the term ‘professional footballer’ should mean more than just getting paid for turning up to games and training. ‘Professionalism’ has to be about having the personal pride to put in a shift, at the end of which you know you have given your best, even if that best was not good enough on the day. We all love a ‘trier’ and equally get rightly annoyed at those who don’t ‘fight till the game is won’.
- Consistency
Fans should also be able to expect that the team and each individual within it performs not just week in week out, but through the course of each match. What grieves me as much as the lack of application seen in many games recently is that we have seen those same players perform to a much better level. How can we turn on a fine performance against Gillingham yet a few weeks later be so thoroughly abject against Worcester? Why did it take until the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] half against Peterborough for the ‘real Coventry City’ to turn up? We looked like world beaters for the first 30 minutes against Crawley, then imploded; we gave it a right go for 15 minutes of the 2[SUP]nd[/SUP] half against Crewe having meekly surrendered the game in the 1[SUP]st[/SUP] half. When you know that actually the team and the players in the squad are capable of better, the massive dips in performance feel worse than if we were consistently rubbish. Like the issue of commitment, for me this comes down to a question of attitude.
- Cohesion
In part, this is about having a good system and organisation, playing to a plan. Much has been talked recently about how we line up, the much criticised 3-5-2 (or 5-3-2) compared to the traditional 4-4-2. Well we started with the traditional plan on Sunday – how did that work out for us? With the fundamental lack of commitment I’m not sure any formation would make much difference. By the end of the match I couldn’t work out what system we were playing other than ‘headless chickens’. The more important element of cohesion in my opinion is teamwork: players showing for each other; covering in defence; supporting in attack; encouraging and motivating their colleagues on the park. What has concerned me when we have suffered the dips in performance is the lack of movement by players off the ball so that when we have possession there are limited options for the passer. When we are having our better moments, players are running into space and calling for the ball, enabling attacking opportunities to be created. (You could add the term ‘Team Spirit’ under this heading though I was recently reminded of this quote by Steve Archibald of Scotland, Spurs, Barcelona etc.: ‘Team Spirit is an illusion glimpsed only in moments of victory’.)
- Control
Good teams impose themselves on weaker opposition and make themselves difficult to beat by superior sides. Much of this is down to ‘looking after the ball’, making sure that you don’t give away easy possession, forcing the opposition to chase the game. It’s a much harder and more energy-sapping game when you are the side with the minority of possession, the probability is that you are going to come out on the wrong side of the score-line. Of course, it means that good teams have to have players with good ball retention skills and/or the ability to find a pass to a player wearing the identical shirt to themselves; and when they do lose the ball, they apply pressure to win it back quickly by closing down and getting in tackles and interceptions.
- Confidence
A really difficult element when a side is on a long run of poor results. Yet individual players have to have self-belief that they are good enough to be playing and succeeding at whatever level, otherwise they will surely fail. Young James Maddison, one of the few positive features from Sunday, demonstrated it in abundance while those around him were letting us down. His run into the 18 yard box which brought our penalty was one of several moments that showed he believed that he deserved to be on that pitch and was better than his opponents. The fact that so many older, more experienced players were nowhere near that level shows not just a lack of confidence, it was an absence of mental strength. ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going’ should be a motto rammed home to this group of players, if they can’t live up to it they should ‘get going out of Coventry’. (Of course, self-belief can sometimes be misplaced as Reda showed by wasting Maddison’s good work with the worst penalty fail of 2014.)
- Creativity
- Composure
I hope and pray that tomorrow night and going forward, we at least see items 1 to 3 from this list. Otherwise I really fear for the future of this club.