Coventry City opinion from CoventryLive as Sky Blues reporter Andy Turner looks at the evolution of the club under Mark Robins and Adi Viveash
Any football team’s path to success is one of consistency and growth. Over the course of the previous six or so years, Mark Robins has become an expert at it. In the Championship play-off final at Wembley Stadium last season, he led Coventry City from the bottom of League Two to the verge of a return to the Premier League.
Good hiring practises and figuring out a secret recipe that allowed the team to choose a nucleus of players who could develop into stars season after season have been essential to that. When considering the 2017–18 promotion campaign, Marc McNulty’s goals and the performances of important players like Michael Doyle propelled the team into League One.
After scoring 26 goals in a single season, McNulty naturally moved on. Conor Chaplin, Jordy Hiwula, and Amadou Bakayoko were among the players who came and went during the consolidation period before the Sky Blues resumed their winning ways. The quality increased with the entrance of Matty Godden, Liam Walsh, and Callum O’Hare, among others, and City won the championship the following year.
Gus Hamer and Viktor Gyokeres were two other outstanding hires that helped the team grow year after year and prepare for its mostly unanticipated shot at promotion last season. However, with such a high player turnover from the previous summer—including the departure of his two most important players—and a significant amount of inadvertent waste with players who weren’t good enough, Robins has once again had to hit the reset button. They don’t find that disrespectful; it’s just a normal part of the process. While some players lag behind a team’s goals, others do not keep up.
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