Stand up for the champions
Coventry Sphinx are the champions. Yes, you read that correctly.
The intention of this newsletter is to take a slightly weird look at football from the perspective of a cynical obsessive. I want to cover as many leagues and clubs and players as possible. I want to write about every curio and cultural talking point that pops into my head.
Not this week.
This week, I ask for your indulgence and patience. Coventry Sphinx, the team I support, won the league on Saturday. For the first time ever I’ve followed a team home and away without missing a match and they’ve won the bloody league. Supporters of successful clubs won’t understand this feeling but I honestly thought I’d never see the day.
So this issue of the newsletter is about my boys. It couldn’t be any other way. I hope you get something from reading it – football is the universal language, after all – but even if you don’t, I’ll be back on some other nutty track next week. Please stick around.
Stand up for the champions
April 2023 will be remembered as the greatest month in the history of Coventry Sphinx Football Club. There’s no discussion to be had, no caveats, no mitigation to take into account. It’s not even close.
The club was formed in 1946 as a continuation of the successful Coventry side Armstrong Whitworth Aircraft. 77 years later the club acquired the freehold to its Sphinx Drive home. Sphinx are more secure than ever before and the future, we hope, is bright.
Eight days after the ground news was announced the first team won the league and achieved promotion to Step 4 (the eighth tier of English football) for the first time in Sphinx’s history. You could say the present is pretty bright too. The same is true of the women’s team, who won their league the next day.
Non-league football is about people. Everybody associated with the club has a story, from the longest-serving supporter to the most recent signing on the pitch. Every one of us has our own experience and the unique set of circumstances and choices that brought us here.
I’m ten years into my relationship with a club I intend to support in person for the rest of my life. Seeing our best ever team win the Uhlsport United Counties League Premier Division South and stride into uncharted territory meant the world to me. Nobody deserves anything in football apart from the people who achieve it but I wanted desperately for this particular group of players to be our history makers.
It vindicates everything I’ve thought about them all along. In the future, when I bore the arse off the youngsters about this player and that, about the best team the club’s ever had, I can point to this season because they did it. They actually did it.
So many football supporters trudge through a lifetime of loyalty in the knowledge that they’ll never see their team win the league. I was one of them until I wasn’t. It was magical. Being top of the pile, winning the most points, taking the one automatic promotion place and leaving seventeen other teams behind – it’s the strangest, most satisfying feeling.
Seeing Sphinx win the title this season has given me more than I would ever have expected. People I love and respect are happy, united and optimistic about tomorrow. This football club has become my football life and my home and this team and their title are in my blood now. That’s special.
On the other hand, my proximity to their success has removed my ability to wrap my brain around just how spectacular their achievement really is. Following at close quarters for nine months has robbed me of my sense of the bigger picture: Coventry Sphinx have pulled off one of the great title wins.
The table in the matchday programme for the game against Desborough Town on 28th February made for grim reading. Third-placed Sphinx were 19 points behind leaders Rugby Town and five behind Wellingborough Town, albeit with several games in hand on both.
They’d just been beaten at home by Wellingborough and away against fourth-placed Newport Pagnell Town, damaging defeats bisected by a gutting penalty shoot-out loss in the FA Vase. February was seen as a big month for Sphinx and all three big games went against them.
The first game in March was a goalless draw at Milton Keynes Irish. That was the last time Sphinx dropped a point. They ended the season with eleven consecutive league wins, a run that began with a 6-0 home victory against Lutterworth Town and ended with a 7-0 win over Eynesbury Rovers to clinch the championship.
Sphinx conceded just once in the last six matches. They won away at Wellingborough and March Town United, both in form. They came from behind to beat Histon, also in fine fettle at the time, with Dion Dublin and the Premier League trophy in attendance on Non-League Day.
While Rugby buckled after being rather too vocally convinced the job was done months before the end of the season, Sphinx smashed their way through test after test after test.
Opponents who’d beaten them in reverse fixtures? No problem. Teams on long winning runs? Handled. Conceding the first goal and having to dig themselves out of a hole? More than once. Sphinx started winning when only they believed and kept on winning once it was in their hands, then when they went top, and just never stopped.
As feats of steel and nerve go, it’s a sensational one for a team on the brink of history. Yet it wasn’t surprising. Watching Rugby disappear over the horizon despite Sphinx’s win over them earlier in the season was tough. It left me with the question of who might be the best team in the Premier Division South.
It wasn’t Rugby, that’s for sure. Wellingborough were the team who came to Sphinx Drive and really gave us a lesson – in finishing especially – but Sphinx beat them on their own turf just a few weeks later.
It looked for some time as if Newport Pagnell’s threat was significant, their ability to consistently pick up results allowing them to sneak up the table behind the glare of their latest FA Vase run. They could easily have lost twice to Sphinx in 2022/23 after they split the points in 2021/22. The records show that they took four points instead because they are a very handy side.
I only recently realised that the best team in the Premier Division South was the one that was going to win it – which, incidentally, I became entirely certain about to the point of being nerveless during this extraordinary run-in.
Sphinx have won the most games. If Rugby fail to win their last match then Sphinx will also have won the most games both home and away. They scored 106 goals (an average of more than three per match) and conceded 22 (just under 0.65 per match), the best in the division on both counts. It’s beyond debate.
Being so close to it all, in the thick of it from the first kick to the last, might have made it difficult to comprehend exactly what these players were doing. But it does mean I’ve seen first-hand all the work that’s gone in, the character of the team, the masterful management behind-the-scenes and the togetherness that’s given us these beautiful football memories.
The team spirit has been out of this world both on and off the pitch. Promotion was a club-wide effort spearheaded by a wonderful playing staff and management but not possible without the coaches, support crew and medical team, volunteers, committee and supporters.
The sense of unity has been incredible, evidenced to the annoyance of a few by the now traditional post-victory celebration. In the days after Sphinx won the league a Premier League club used the word ‘family’ in a tweet announcing massive increases in season ticket prices. That’s not family. This is family.
Joint managers John Woodward and Shaun Thomas selected 31 players in 2022/23. Clearly a few of them weren’t in the squad by the end of the season but their contributions – both in the early part of this campaign and before – mean they’re very much a part of this historic success.
Everyone thinks their football club is special. Mine actually is; that team effort makes it so. We’ve gone from attendances occasionally slipping under thirty to Step 4 in a matter of months. Until someone corrects me I strongly suspect we’re the smallest club at our new level.
But we’re all heart. New supporters are welcomed warmly and completely. Volunteers are appreciated, players backed to the hilt. Trawl through social media on any matchday and you won’t find any individual player criticised, nor the team abused or even assessed. We’ve had some hard times in my decade at the club but we’ve done it together.
This title win is for us all. For the Sphinx family. For a phenomenal team with more guts than Billingsgate Market. For the legends who were sadly no longer with us by the time I joined the club. For Evan Evans, on whose birthday we won our last away game. For Dick McKinnon, who would have been 84 on the day Callum Woodward lifted the trophy.
I miss Eve and Dick every day but on Saturdays especially. I know they’d have loved all this because they’re champions too. We’ll be thinking of them when we somehow, unbelievably, unfathomably, kick off at Step 4 in August.
“Have you won the league or something?”
You’d better believe it.
“When I started out in 1999 I was one of five or six black managers. It is 2023 and I am probably one of less than five or six black managers. That is 24 years. Nothing seems to have changed.
“What has changed is that there are a lot more black players on the pitch; 43% of players are black and 40% have the Pro Licence. But we are seeing 4% in managerial jobs. There is something still not right.”
Chorley manager Andy Preece sums up the importance of the work of the Black Footballers Partnership after taking charge of his 750th senior match.
Salty beef extracts
Ollie Watkins’ record-breaking form for Aston Villa is worth its weight in gold for Exeter City (i)
MLS debutants are supposed to struggle. Don’t tell red-hot St Louis City (The Guardian)
Alex Fletcher: ‘I felt like if I passed out that could have been it really’ (The Guardian)
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Have a week.