LFW Awaydays - Coventry, Ricoh Arena
Thursday, 25th Feb 2010 00:15

On the pitch Rangers were beaten again at the Ricoh Arena, off the pitch things were little better for the LoftforWords travelling party.

1 – The Match
I can rarely recall seeing a really great match on this ground. Considering through the 1990s at Highfield Road City were involved in some right classics it seems strange that having moved to this topless IKEA warehouse that entertainment has suddenly dried up. I recall a couple of cup ties, with Newcastle last season and Portsmouth this, that really had me enthralled but league games, both those with QPR and the ones televised against other sides, have been dire whenever I’ve seen them. Whether that’s down to the lack of atmosphere, the poor quality of the pitch or City’s tactics under a succession of managers who can say?

This was no different. QPR were marginally the better of the two sides, on top with possession and shots on goal, but the game was of painfully low quality with barely three passes strung together all afternoon. For all their dominance, though you could hardly call it that, Rangers only looked like scoring in the very last minute of injury time at the end of the game when Antonio German sent an unplayable ball through the six yard box and Jay Simpson failed to convert at the far post under heavy pressure from a covering defender. The Sky Blues took the lead early from a deflected Gary Deegan shot and Fredy Eastwood missed when played clean through right at the death but apart from that they offered little and the QPR side of October would have won this handsomely.

For the neutral, on a day so cold it sliced through your soul and made you wish you were dead, nothing here worth getting out of bed for.
3/10

2 – QPR Performance
Well it was better. Marginally. Considering our previous few games had included home defeats to struggling Scunthorpe and Ipswich, a 5-0 defeat at Nottingham Forest and a 1-0 loss to a Peterborough side that hadn’t won since the last ice age it could hardly have been worse. Rangers did put themselves about a little bit, Connolly in the middle of midfield was an unusual move for Harford to take and not an entirely successful one but Connolly did a better job there than Quashie or Leigertwood have been doing lately and the defence was not as exposed as it had been. That said it as another goal from midfield that cost us, albeit and extremely unlucky one from our point of view. Simpson played better than he has done for a while in attack, perhaps stung by being left out at Peterborough, but Priskin alongside him was very lightweight and failed to adequately control simple balls on countless occasions – German was better when he came on. Everybody was mediocre basically – nobody really excelled, everybody tried, everybody looked very low on confidence, there seemed to be no real belief in the team. It was an improvement on what we have seen but still pretty poor overall.
5/10

3 – QPR Support
I’d estimate that we took about 600 up there, and those are the 600 die hards (300 midweek) who will simply be there at every away game regardless. In dreadful weather in a desperate part of the world with the team playing abysmally and attractions within walking distance of the ground beginning and ending with a big Tesco there really was no reason whatsoever for anybody from QPR to make this journey. Those that did made no noise whatsoever. A couple of lads at the back tried, but it was only a couple, and most simply sat quietly and watched the game and the points drift by. That’s not a criticism I promise, I did the same, merely added colour for those that weren’t there. A malaise engulfs our team currently. At the final whistle Cook, Ramage, Hill and Ikeme were the only ones to acknowledge the travelling support, the others turned with indecent haste for the tunnel, many even forgoing the handshakes with Coventry players just to get in, get on the bus, and get back home.
5/10

4 – Atmosphere
Much like the QPR performance – better but pretty awful all the same. The design of this truly horrible stadium does not lend itself to creating an atmosphere – I remember even when we scraped a 1-0 win here on our way to avoiding relegation under John Gregory and there were 2000 QPR fans in full voice we felt as if we were miles away from both the pitch and the Coventry fans and I doubt they heard much of a peep from us. This year a good number of Coventry fans, 500 or so I would say, have started to mass together under the big screen to the right of the away end and try and get a bit of singing and banter going. Don’t get me wrong, this wasn’t the Old Den in full cry by any means and the sheer volume of empty seats and fenced off areas makes this an impossible place to generate anything other than absolute boredom in, but the last time we were here the only noise we heard all afternoon was a loud horn noise in the second half that sounded like a cross between an elephant breaking wind (possibly the acrobatic Coventry mascot) and a giant door opening so this was marginally better than that. As I said earlier the QPR fans said nothing all afternoon so the whole thing was a bit of a none-event really. Had you been walking past the ground between three and five I doubt you’d have realised there was even a game on. Points off for the totally unnecessary, shambolic and thoroughly embarrassing pre-match farce that saw the public address announcer go through some long winded welcome to the press before screaming “GOOD AFTERNOON TESCO STAND” to which he received no response whatsoever, followed by “GOOD AFTERNOON COVENTRY EVENING TELEGRAPH STAND” which got even less response than he’d had before. Every year Coventry do this, every year nobody responds, every year I cringe on their behalf. Why, why, why? What does this achieve other than to further highlight how few people are there?
3/10

5 – The Ground
I’m only going into this again because I have to fill in this section of the form. To briefly summarise previous complaints: it’s in the middle of nowhere, there are very few pubs or places to eat or places to do anything within walking distance, it’s half empty, the atmosphere is abysmal, the concourse areas look as if they haven’t been finished, the “beer” in the ground is 3% Carling served warm in a plastic bottle, you can see into the toilets from the steps up to the seats, the seats are too far away from the pitch, huge sections in the corner are fenced off and there are 2000 empty seats before you get to another human being either side of the away end, one of the stands is called the Tesco stand, the roof is 50feet higher than it needs to be making atmosphere difficult to generate even with a big crowd, three sides are all one level and one colour, the pitch looks like it has cattle on it during the week. Look I hate the place alright, I’ve hated it since the first day we came here the first day it opened, it’s everything that’s wrong with modern football stadiums. ‘Good afternoon Tesco Stand’ – Lord give me strength.
3/10

6 – The Journey
To be honest the Northern R’s weren’t really feeling this game at all. Normally it’s a train out of Sheffield, changing at Birmingham then drinks in the city centre and out to the ground late on. However recent trips to Peterborough, Nottingham and Sheffield have been so dire from a football point of view that the four of us only really decided we were going about a week before and we decided pretty early on that we’d just drive down, suffer, drive back and forget about it. Southampton v Portsmouth had the look of a blood bath for lunch time entertainment so the plan was to drive down from Sheffield to the pub near the M6 in time for the kick off of that. I factored in the 15 miles of road works past Nottingham with a 50 mile per hour average speed check to protect a workforce that is never there doing any bloody work and decided Sheffield to Coventry would probably be just under two hours so I arranged to pick Ellis and Owain up around Hillsborough at 10ish. I then went into auto pilot really, cruising down the outside lane of the M1 listening to Danny Baker and Fighting Talk. It was only when, at quarter past 11, I saw a sign saying Coventry was only 16 miles away that I realised we’d made a grave mistake. By we, I mean I. Despite immediately sliding into the inside lane and knocking a good 40 miles per hour off the speed limit we were still parking up in the Leisure Ireland field next to the M6 ridiculously early – the man setting the cones out was very surprised to see his first customers of the day, some 90 minutes earlier than he usually welcomes them. The trip home was similarly quick and uneventful although I had a terrible job staying awake, further reinforcing why match days should be train days not driving ones.
6/10

7 – Pre Match
Did you used to play a game when you were a kid where ten items would be placed on a tray, and you’d turn around and then when you looked again one was gone and you had to remember what it was? Well The Black Horse next to the M6 near (sort of) Coventry’s ground is like the pub equivalent of that game. On our first visit here we drove, it was a beautiful sunny day, the car park was rammed and the pub absolutely heaving. We sat in the beer garden and drank the afternoon away. This was our third visit since then and, well, oh dear. I really don’t want to be too cruel and nasty because the land lord was a really lovely fella who was very friendly and chatty with us when we pitched up at half past 11 but, well, oh dear.

Firstly you’d struggle to spot that this was a pub from the outside. As we approached from the car park The Black Horse writing was barely visible on the side, the burger van that has previously been serving out the front was boarded up and closed and the only sign of life was a small bearded man in a little shack in the car park who, upon seeing us approach, threw his arms around a large commercial waste bin and stared us out, presumably fearing we were about to rob him of its contents – or perhaps even the bin itself. The large colourful sign I remembered from previous years advertising the beer garden, pub snacks, Sky Sports, family atmosphere etc was still up so in we went.

Now this year the items removed since our previous visit were the heating and the Sky Sports. It was absolutely bitter in there. The bottled lager was kept on a shelf behind the bar rather than in the fridge but you could scarcely notice the difference. Owain and Ellis had soft drinks, served in cans rather than from a pump or tap, and I had a bottle of Budweiser (yeh, I know) as it was the only bottled lager on offer. When we sat down we noticed that all three bore the “part of a multipack, not for separate resale” mark of quality.

The landlord confirmed that he in fact did not have Sky any more despite the sign outside but as the Southampton game was luckily on ITV he agreed to stick it on for us on a small wall mounted flat screen. Another ten QPR fans arrived there as the day went on, and we all huddled together for warmth around the 18 inches of entertainment. The other thing, and I swear to God I’ve always liked this pub and I don’t want to be unduly harsh, was the smell – the smells from the gents was overpowering to the point of making you retch when you went in there and it filled the rest of the pub and hung in the freezing air. As we’d arrived stupidly early we had to sit through whatever toss ITV puts on for the country’s chavs apart from football which, on this occasion, was a bizarre programme where Meatloaf sang Bat out of Hell in opera style flanked by a member of the public in a posh frock and Alan Titchmarsh. So there we all were, in the freezing cold, drinking multipack bottled Budweiser, watching Meatloaf do opera, in an empty pub, under the M6.

There is a wider debate to have here because either this is a pub run by the tightest man in the world, or it’s yet another independently owned boozer in Britain on its last legs financially and struggling to survive. Now I cannot stand the Wetherspoons and Yates type places that are springing up on every corner and would rather go and sit in an independently owned pub every time – but really, they have to do more to attract your trade than this. What would bring you back here for a return visit? The smell? The freezing cold? The lack of food or live football? The beer bought in a multi pack and sold to you at a mark up? I feel sorry for the owners of this place because when we first came here it was a thriving little place and for one reason or another it’s clearly suffered recently – but you’ve got to give the customers more than this. It’s now, very sadly, an absolute dive.
3/10

8 – Police and Stewards
Very little sign of either on a ground where we’ve had big problems with both in the past.
8/10
Total – 36/80

Photo: Action Images

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