Dear WSC
Neil Reynolds (WSC 180) thinks it inconceivable that Lee Hughes should choose to leave West Brom for Coventry for footballing reasons, but I think he should consider the facts at the time that decision was made rather than the current league table.
When Hughes signed for Coventry we were rated as second favourites by most bookmakers to be promoted back to the Premiership. Just about every pundit considered us to be more likely to get promotion than the Baggies and at the point of Hughes’s signature the full extent of Coventry’s debts had not yet been made public. These are the footballing reasons. We were considered to have a better team than West Brom. The fact that West Brom have a bigger stadium and higher attendances are not footballing reasons. The fact is that Hughes would have felt that he was more likely to get promotion with Coventry than with Albion.The real gist of this is that fans of some of the other Midlands clubs cannot accept the fact that Coventry have been a more successful club for the last 15-20 years and that this may be the reason we have been able to lure their players away (Birmingham – Liam Daish and Gary Breen; Wolves – Steve Froggatt; Baggies – Hughes) so they choose to believe that the players can only have been influenced by financial considerations. To borrow Neil Reynolds’s warthog analogy, that doesn’t wash either.
Ian Hossack, via email
Search: ' midlands'
Stories
Mark Tallentire looks at the Everton board's move against racist chants by their away fans that brought shame on the club
As if Walter Smith did not have enough to do in deciding which member of his squad to play out of position next, the Everton manager had to find time in the run-up to Christmas to make a statement about the racist behaviour of more than a few of the club’s travelling fans.
Tuesday 2 Nine Austrian players refuse to fly to Israel for Saturday’s World Cup qualifier. “It is far too dangerous there,” says one of them, Walter Kogler. Joe Royle says he is suing Man City for a £500,000 pay-off, on the basis that they were still a Premiership club when he was sacked in May, even though they had finished in a relegation spot.
Paul Giess believes that success on the field would help transform the club's profile and in the process atttract a larger fansbase across the Midlands as they struggle to compete with the other leading clubs in the region
Walsall isn’t a small town but the club has nearly always been in the lower divisions. Do some locals support other clubs?
Almost all. Saturday afternoon at the Bescot can be depressing but on a non-match Saturday the town centre is even worse. A seemingly non-stop procession of Villa, West Brom and Wolves shirts mingle with the Man Utd brigade. Maybe if the club had had more success in its early days it might have built up the fan base now lost to our neighbours. It may take ten years’ success to get us noticed again.
Continuing our occasional series on defunct competitions, Lionel Birnie dons his plimsolls and recalls the glory days of the televised indoor tournaments
Despite increasingly sophisticated coaching methods, the humble five-a-side has endured. It is still the traditional way for teams to round off the last training session of the week. But despite its far-reaching popularity, no one would think of organising an indoor tournament for Premiership clubs. Can you imagine Sir Alex’s face if he was asked by the FA to send David, Roy and Juan Sebastian to the G-Mex the night before a Champions League match?