League is packed with clubs recalling past glories and desperate to escape it but success shouldn’t just be for the moneyed eliteThe Premier League champions of 2015-16 play the winners of one of the greatest FA Cup finals. One of the original two super-clubs play the most successful Welsh side of all time. The seventh-most successful side in league history play a former Uefa Cup winner. Sunday’s Championship fixture list serves as a reminder of how fortunate the English (and Welsh) league is to have such depth – and perhaps also as a warning.All six teams in action – Leicester, Coventry, Leeds, Cardiff, Sunderland and Ipswich – have won the league title or the FA Cup or both. Of the...
One half of Wembley was a sea of orange as this £170m match showed it was about more than just money for both teamsTen minutes after Rob Edwards had been brought to a halt halfway around Wembley, celebrating furiously a goal that was shortly disallowed, the Luton manager was to be found victorious but calm as still water. His first action on winning the playoff final was to hug his opponent Mark Robins. Around this tender scene was pure chaos, meanwhile; his players haring about, embracing and hurling each other to the ground like so many 6ft-tall puppy dogs. Promotion, it’s a hell of a drug.Luton Town are a Premier League club and international broadcast packages can now finally be...
With my club on the verge of a remarkable return to the Premier League, I’m ready to bury the hurt of the bad timesQueueing at the luggage drop at Sydney airport in Australia in 2017, I glanced around and wondered whether any other expats were as desperate as I was. To watch a game of football I was embarking on a 21,000-mile round trip to the UK and sacrificing a few thousand pounds – not to mention my environmental conscience. This wasn’t just any game, of course. This was the Checkatrade Trophy final between Coventry City and Oxford United.The journey made sense, I reassured myself: Coventry’s last appearances at Wembley came in 1987 when I was four years old and...
The cramped stadium – like Luton the town – attracts ridicule but Saturday’s playoff final is a huge sliding doors momentShortly before 8pm last Tuesday, a remarkable act of transfiguration took place at Kenilworth Road. At that precise moment, Luton’s cramped and crumbling old stadium, with a capacity barely above 10,000, became a raging, roaring, hot-headed monster. The noise barely stopped for the next 90 minutes, at which point Luton’s players had seen off Sunderland and were heading to a playoff final at Wembley – and the jokes and sneers about their old ground had resurfaced again on social media.Does Kenilworth Road deserve to grace the Premier League? If Luton can get past Coventry on Saturday, the only answer is...
Monday’s shock sacking of Rob Edwards has only deepened supporters’ growing resentment of Gino PozzoThere is no doubt that Watford have been failing this season. The Championship’s pre-season promotion favourites sit 10th and have won one of their last seven league games – and that thanks to a goal deep into stoppage time. Having kept hold of João Pedro and Ismaïla Sarr, two forwards whose combined value has been estimated at upwards of £50m, they have been outscored by 14 sides and had more shots on target than only three. Performances have been incoherent and wildly unimpressive, with the Hornets’ possession consisting largely of central defenders passing the ball among themselves until the crowd grows restless and one of them...