A day off work to go and see the GB's play Coventry away. Took about an hour and a half to get up the M40. The stadium is placed around a lot of retail parks and it wasn't clear if you were allowed to park in the them or not. I went into Tesco and was met with two officials at the car park gate asking me if I was 'football or shopping'. Seeing how I had no football stuff on me or on the car I risked it by saying shopping and they let me in for free. I parked in a quiet bit well away from the shop and hoped my car wouldn't be clamped when I came back to it. Luckily it wasn't! The Ricoh is another nice modern ground similar to Leicester. Good access into and out of and easy to walk all the way round. Entering inside I was impressed with how many Watford fans had made the trip. Even so we still fitted comfortably in the area under the stand and the toilet and catering facilties were good and numerous.
Numerous isn't a word that could be used for the Coventry fans. The Ricoh holds around 30,000 and the attendance was about 18,000 of which probably 2,500 were Watford fans. Every side of the ground looked half full with lots of blue seats visable. This lead to two great chants 'Your grounds too big for you' and 'Why don't you all sit together'. In fact the whole matchday experience at Coventry is a bit sad and desperate. There are daily press reports about how much debt Cov are in and everything about the club comes across as 'we are desperate for money'. Both the manager and chairmans programme notes were asking fans to bring friends and family to games and a common theme throughout the programme was 'lets fill the Ricoh'. Well you could start by not making it so big! Also the stands were just shamefully called 'The Jewson Stand', 'The Coventry Telegraph Stand', 'The something else I can't remember stand' and worst of all 'The Tesco Stand'. Now, okay as I've already pointed out there is a Tesco nearby but the Tesco stand isn't the stand next to Tesco so presumably this is a sponsorship deal. The whole thing was just desperate. I'm glad that as yet we haven't gone down this road. Eventually I guess we will one day but it does make everything a bit sordid.
What made this all much more palatable was the match. We were fantastic and were all over them. Once we got the first goal the match was never in doubt. Adam Johnson tapped home, Marlon then got a second shortly afterwards and to really kill off the game Darius scored just after half time. Coventry were awful. Truly terrible. But we deserve the credit for making them look so bad. We looked like one of those teams from last season who could score at will and were just enjoying playing with the opposition but didn't feel it was fair to make the score too embarrassing.
Needless to say the amount of blue seats got more and more visible during the game and we had great fun echoing 'we are top of the league' and 'Dowie Dowie what's the score' round the empty stadium.
