"Happy birthday to you, is this the end for Sky Blues?" (1 Viewer)

ajsccfc

Well-Known Member
In case anyone doesn't subscribe to the Guardian's Fiver email, we're lead story (weeeey!) kind of. It's really more a jab at the FL, but here we go:

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Coventry fans get into the party spirit. Photograph: Offside / Rex Features



A BLOW FOR BRITAIN'S 37th-HAPPIEST MAJOR URBAN CENTRE

Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday to you. Happy birthday dear Football League. Happy birthday to you!



Exactly 125 years ago (give or take a month. And a bit) some people, almost all of them wearing handsome moustaches, played some games of football. Times were tough for England's nascent football clubs back then. Players were expected to wear absurdly long shorts and someone had to pay for all that cotton, a financial imperative that perhaps explains the shortage of life's indulgences, such as razors. One of the founder members of the Football League, Accrington, was out of money within five years and disbanded inside 10.


Hilarious, isn't it, looking back now, how times have changed. These days footballers drive Bentleys, shave with almost reckless regularity – a number of them not stopping with their chins and doing their entire head, just for the sheer joy of it – and work in one of the nation's most cash-flushed industries. This very week two television networks went head-to-head with football their primary battleground, the result being that the sport is strewn with their money. Or at least, a few clubs at the top of it are.


These big jubilees are a perfect time for retrospection, and the Football League has made a special effort to return in particularly stylish, anniversary-championing style. As part of their efforts to celebrate their remarkable landmark, they arranged some fixtures of particularly special significance for the start of this special season. Derby were told to play Blackburn, Burnley asked to face Bolton, and, in what proved a one-sided contest, Coventry City lined up against their creditors. They lost.


Coventry, the city that gave us Rover cars, Philip Larkin, the bicycle, the Specials, Europe's longest bus route, My Ding-A-Ling and Richard Keys, the city that revels in the status of Britain's 37th-happiest major urban centre and whose club once spent 34 consecutive years in English football's top flight, can now claim ownership of the most down-at-heel side in the land. Except they can't really, because Coventry play in Northampton these days. Whatever, England's anniversary season will start with this proud club marooned on -15 points. Or maybe -30, according to some people who know more about these things than the Fiver.


Either way, we suppose it's a fitting way to mark the occasion. The Football League: putting clubs together since 1888; watching them go out of business since 1896. Happy birthday to you.
 

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