By Tony Alvarez
On December the 8th I wrote an article looking at the form of Coventry City who were sitting 5th in the championship just four points off an automatic promotion, the title of this article was “Can Coventry City maintain their promotion push” we now have an answer…..No.
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http://shoutsfromthestands.wordpress.com/2010/12/08/can-coventry-maintain-their-promotion-push/
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In this article I said that I could see a lot of similarities with Aidy Boothroyd’s Colchester side of last season who were flying at the start of the season and ran out of steam towards the end of the season thus missing out on the play offs.
I receieved various responses from Coventry fans some who agreed some who never but many felt I was harsh to think that your team would suffer a second half of the season slump as Colchester did.
Now this isn’t an I told you so article because to be honest Coventry fans have been the best I dealt with so far so I have been wishing them well, but a look at their results since that December 8th article will show huge disappointment for Coventry City fans.
Since Dec 8th the club have played 14 fixtures winning just one drawing 4 and losing 9 picking up just 7 points. Not even the most biased Sky Blues fan can tell you this is not relegation form.
The club now lie 19th in the Championship table, whilst their not in a relegation dog fight the club has to look nervously over its shoulder.
The question remains what has caused this slump? The results took a turn for the worse in December and that’s surely too early for fatigue to be an excuse as I highlighted in my previous article, for me looking as an outsider the major problem is the goals have dried up.
Since December 2010 Coventry have only scored more than one goal in a match once, which was in the one victory they have had. So unless the defence is water tight (more on that in a minute) there’s always going to be problems.
Now onto the defence since that December 8th article there have been only 2 clean sheets in all competitions, if the side cannot score more than one goal a game and cannot keep clean sheets they are going to struggle.
The Sky Blues have some tricky fixtures coming up and will not be filled with confidence due to both recent form and the 4-1 hammering at the hands of Bristol City on Saturday but will need to pick up some points from somewhere to keep themselves out of the scrap.
In my last piece I predicted a comfortable mid table finish between 8th-12th place, if offered that now Coventry fans would bite my hand off, there is only 9 points off that 12th spot which was the lower end of my prediction but realistically they are not going to achieve that and would probably settle for anywhere that isn’t in a relegation scrap.
Where do you think coventry’s poor form has come from? How can the club turn it around? Am I talking nonsense suggesting fatigue is an issue? Is Boothroyd still the right man for the job? Where will you finish this season?
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