What a great day out. Lovely fine blue sky, train up (1st class of course), taxi to the ground, lunch in the spacious restaurant with many ex-Coventry players (I got to hold the toilet door open for one of our 1987 cup winning side!), seats on the balcony over the halfway line, drinks at half time, my colleague won the raffle (and donated the signed ball to me) and won £80 on betting on the score, a curry just outside the station, train back and home in time to watch Match of the Day; a day spent with some of my best and oldest friends. What more could a man ask for? Well a Coventry win I suppose. Or even a half decent performance. Odd game in that it started with a truly comic bit of awful defending which we somehow survived, only to hoof the ball down the other end and miraculously score inside 2 minutes. And despite City looking absolutely terrible throughout, we held on. Until 6 minutes from time, whereupon we promptly conceded two. Oh the pain. That's football. Although to describe our lot as footballers would be pushing it. Fine at kicking a ball provided you don't worry about direction or distance.
Lunch was billed as with "Coventry Legends". Now this was probably stretching the definition of "legend" a bit. They included some old codgers who had only played at City for a season in the sixties. But they did include Tommy Hutchison and Willie Carr who were I suppose boyhood heroes.
Co-presenter for all the chat was a sort of Coventry legend, Brian "Harry" Roberts. Not, it is fair to say, the most talented of players, but a fan's favourite for giving 100% in his full-back berth. And surprisingly for one of the least cultured of players, he was a really good presenter. Wouldn't be out of place on TV to be honest.
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| Harry Roberts interviewing man of the match, City goalkeeper Joe Murphy. |
Lunch was pretty good (facilities at Coventry being far superior to Tottenham for hospitality, although at White Hart Lane they throw in some talented footballers to watch after the crap food). But the service was comically bad. The waitresses (for whom English was not their first language) just couldn't remember who was taking orders from which table, so kept on coming round and asking whether we had ordered yet. And then came out with more plates than there were diners. Still it all came.
And all in all a really enjoyable day. One of the joys about being 50 is that your team losing really doesn't matter much. At 15 it did. And that's bad news as Coventry have done a lot of losing over the years.
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