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...
Newcastle need to invest in squad depth, Bryan Gil is in derby contention and Coventry count cost of ‘embarrassing’ lossHalf a week is a long time in football. On Thursday, for 45 minutes, Chelsea were good enough to make Manchester City look pedestrian. On Sunday, they were so poor that City located their unstoppable mode, which had gone missing since mid-October. Chelsea are now out of both domestic cups, and in the Premier League, after scraping one win from their past eight games, they are closer to the bottom (13 points ahead of Southampton) than the top (19 behind Arsenal). Top four? They’re not even in the top four in London, with Brentford and Fulham lording it over them, never...
Despite a small squad and a handful of new recruits Leeds’s performance at Bristol City put down a markerLeeds’s season is 90 minutes old but they could not have made a more convincing start than a 3-1 win at Bristol City. The caveat is that blazing starts are nothing new under Marcelo Bielsa and he acknowledged that this is ground zero in terms of achieving the Premier League return he stuck around to realise. The wry smile and sheepish chuckle that greeted a question asking if his team’s suffocating performance in platinum and pink surpassed his expectations said as much. “I know perfectly well that this is a long season and all of the things that happen at the start...
Blackpool supporters can finally talk of Owen Oyston in the past tense, which may just offer hope to those at Charlton, Coventry and elsewhere with inadequate or reviled ownersThat was a belter of a line from Lieven De Turck, representing the always bewildering Roland Duchâtelet at a forum of Charlton Athletic supporters a few nights ago, when the man reputedly in charge of trying to sell the club floated what viewers of Blackadder might recognise as the “cunning plan” option.He didn’t put it in those terms, of course, but equally I’m not even sure Baldrick would have come up with something quite so brilliantly harebrained as standing up in front of a room of already exasperated football fans and proposing,...