“Respect Coventry, please,” said Pep Guardiola on Saturday evening when a presumptuous TV reporter asked Manchester City’s manager about the prospect of another all-Manchester FA Cup final. Guardiola knew Coventry City would be no pushovers for Manchester United in Sunday’s semi-final, yet even he couldn’t have envisaged how close they would drag Erik ten Hag’s side towards ruin in the most scintillating and sickening football experience of my life.
I’ve watched plenty of Coventry defeats down the years – enough to become desensitised to it, I thought. I cried at Villa Park when we were relegated from the Premier League in 2001; I watched from the press box with weary resignation as Doncaster consigned us to League One in 2012; and I experienced mixed emotions when Luton denied us a Premier League berth last May. But seeing us lose to United at Wembley after a preposterous three-goal comeback was an entirely new kind of trauma.
Strangely, it was a dire first-half performance from Coventry, one in which we looked unnecessarily fearful of our opponents. It was only when Mark Robins changed formation and brought on Victor Torp and Fábio Tavares that we began to realise United were fragile, even at 3-0 up. The first two goals, from Ellis Simms and Callum O’Hare, were celebrated in the upper tiers of Wembley, where I was sat, with a mixture of pride and excitement. The third brought delirium. I even turned to my dad after Haji Wright’s 95th-minute penalty and declared: “I don’t care what happens next because this has already been unreal.”
Who was I kidding? When Torp’s “goal” in the final seconds of extra time was unexpectedly disallowed for the most fractional offside possible, I was bereft. There can be nothing crueller in football than believing for an entire minute that your side have completed arguably the greatest comeback in FA Cup history, never mind qualifying for the final for the first time in 37 years, only for it to be looted from you.
Coventry’s players had been knee-sliding across the Wembley turf; United’s were comically strewn about the place, wilting from embarrassment. The juxtaposition was immaculate. Imagine the photographs and the headlines, I thought to myself. This felt like a Cup final victory: a slice of Sky Blue footballing history almost on a par with 1987. It was a moment to cherish with my dad and a goal to recreate in the back garden with my son for years to come.
But like many other Coventry fans, I’d forgotten all about VAR (mercifully we don’t have it in the Championship). What a rancid concept it is.
I’ve now watched the replay of Torp’s disallowed strike dozens of times and although Wright looks fractionally offside in the freeze-frame used by VAR, I doubt the officials in Stockley Park can accurately measure marginal offsides, nor can they tell precisely when the throughball left O’Hare’s boot. I have long said that VAR sullies the game we love. Why must the offside law be imposed with such excruciating pedantry? And how have we allowed tortuous remote officiating to steal the purest element of football: our celebrations? If it’s not clearly offside, just let it go!
Perhaps I’m old. Perhaps I’m bitter. But I’d sooner football matches were won and lost on the pitch without any lingering doubts, delays or risk of revocation from afar. And no, I wouldn’t feel much differently if the boot were on the other foot. In the dying stages of Coventry’s Championship playoff final defeat by Luton last May, the Hatters scored a winning goal which was unexpectedly ruled out for handball. The confusion and uncertainty we experienced in the stands while waiting for the VAR to determine our fate that day was arguably more ghastly than Fankaty Dabo’s subsequent penalty miss in the shootout.
And so to penalties, again. I instinctively feared the worst from the moment we lost both coin tosses, one to determine which end the penalties would be taken at and the other to decide who would go first, just as we had done against Luton. But there was still hope, still superstition to cling to. In recent weeks, one Coventry fan gained cult status for the size of his Friday night dinners after he ate a gargantuan sausage and chips before Coventry’s epic win against Wolves in the quarter-final. A taxi was even dispatched from Coventry to Sheffield to deliver the exact same meal to him two days before the semi-final. “Bigfoot” would be our lucky charm in the shootout, wouldn’t it?
Alas, no. The magic of the Cup was extinguished from 12 yards. Now I’m left with deep hurt and a mountain of respect for the Sky Blues.
