Coventry City Football Club - Stadium move confirmed

Asteroid A2/11zf. Yesterday.

The trouble stricken League One Club are preparing to kick off their new campaign against Bristol City more than 4,211 miles from the city after failed negotiations with Arena Coventry Limited (ACL), the owners of the Ricoh Arena.

Coventry have reluctantly agreed a deal with the Football League to play on the barren oxygen starved wastes of Asteroid A2/11zf for the next three years, with Chief Executive Tim Fisher insisting they plan to be playing back on Earth, if not in the city, within that time frame and in a new stadium.

Both a successful real world and online campaign have seen Coventry supporters planning to boycott games held on the freezing cold rocky asteroids surface and their plight has earned the sympathy of other club up and down the country, but Fisher insists that there was no alternative but to move out of the confines of Earths atmosphere.

"The move is regrettable, it's painful", Tim Fisher says. "The fans are right not to be delirious about playing on a grey and barren shattered planetesimal remnant just a short distance away from Mars - and we don't want to do that either. However, that is the only option we've got and it's with a heavy heart that we've had to move"

"It's an absolute joke is what is is," said long time City Supporter Gary Mabuttsnee, "I've been a Sky Blues supporter for all my life but I'm not willing to sacrifice 300 days on a round trip to travel more than 4000 miles under current space technology limitations. Added to the fact that to plan such a journey would set me back approximately 4 billion pounds, and I can't justify that kind of money - especially as I've just bought the new kit for my son."

Coventry remain in administration and were deducted ten points in March to effectively end their slim hopes of making last season's play-offs.

"We must stress that this will not be a permanent move", continued Fisher, "but this has worked for other teams in the past - I'm of course referring to Wimbledons move to the magical realms of Eternia back in 1991 - and we can confirm that we're currently in discussions to build a new stadium in Coventry. And we intend for it to be made of solid gold. Solid fucking gold, you hear that, ACL? DID YOU HEAR THAT?"

Ball Ball Ball Footy Footy Footy

Now, what I know about football could quite comfortably be written with a large black marker pen on one of those oval shaped balls that people who play football (I think they call them “Footballateers”) use. Sport to me is something that other people do, which is good because on the whole it means I don’t have to watch them doing it.

That’s actually a slight exaggeration – I have a vague interest in my home team (Coventry City) and how well they’re doing, and I have been known, on occasion to watch the European Football Championships or the World Cup. I’ll admit I don’t fully understand the offside rule, still struggle to see how footballers can command such ridiculous wages and confess that football struggles to keep my entire interest during the course of the 90 minutes, but I’m not a complete stranger to the game.

So it was with some trepidation that I was nagged – yes, that’s the word for it, nagged – into going to see the final home game of the season on Saturday the 30th of April. Coventry City (safe from relegation but lingering at the bottom third of the npower Championship table) versus Reading (4th or 5th at the time, I can’t recall). I tried to weasel my way out of it, but my wife Tara (a much bigger football fan than I) wasn’t having any of it. Saying that she was ‘disappointed’ was the only female trick she needed to pull out to guilt me into going.

So, Saturday afternoon saw Tara and myself accompanied by Tom, Fran and my dad and Taras mum on the sunny short walk along Longford Canal to the Ricoh Stadium. I’ve been to the Ricoh before, but never to the stadium part – my visits have been either for free tickets to see The Enemy (or for absolutely dreadful meals) or to visit the Tesco superstore next door (and Borders bookstore as well, when it still existed).

Spirits were high as we headed in and I must confessed as we entered the Ricoh itself I couldn’t help but point out to Tara that I was actually quite excited – something I’d never expected to happen. To be honest on my approach I was just looking forward to the end of the whole thing. If you’ve never been into the Ricoh, the Stadium itself is very impressive and sitting in amongst the huge crowds (Attendance was around 22,000 if memory serves) was quite an experience.

(As an aside, strictly speaking this wasn’t my first ever football match. I think I went to my only other match at Coventrys considerably grottier old ground back in Highfield Road around 1980 to see them play Tottenham, but my memories of that day are quite vague.)

Reading had a good turnout, but mind you they’re only down the road. We watched with amusement as many of them had large pink inflatable penises confiscated from them, not something you see every Saturday. Unless you live in Reading, perhaps.

Irate Coventry City Fan Willie Tanner

Only slightly unnerved by the fact that I was sitting right behind Willie Tanner (not in fact a buffing device for large pink inflatable penises, but the dad from eighties TV series Alf) and him getting quite irate at points – at one stage looking like he wanted to fight all of the Reading fans singlehandedly – the game was surprisingly entertaining. Especially surprising to me in that I wasn’t bored for the whole duration of the game, and really enjoyed it.

The new strip was unveiled, the game was great and the chants were funny and good natured, except for some of the choicier and distasteful ones about Coventry Striker (and convicted Sex offender) Marlon King ("She said no marlon! she said no. she said no, Marlon, she said no.")

But at least we got the hear the classic (and my own personal favourite) “In Our Coventry Homes”

In our Coventry homes, in our Coventry homes
We speak with an accent exceedingly rare,
You want a cathedral we've got one to spare,
in our Coventry homes.

Ok, so it was a 0-0 draw but Coventry played excellently.  But this of course means I have to go again next season so I can at least see a goal. I think the real winner of the day was football, game of two halves, sick as a parrot, etc.

From the sublime to the ridiculous

The last two days have seen me witness dramatic opposites in the field of customer service.

Starting with the sublime; Ordered a new phone (the Nokia N97 - review in the next couple of days; Early tests are promising but with a few annoying quirks) from mobiles.co.uk (the online department for the carphone warehouse). Ordered it by lunchtime on Friday but had a few questions about it and the new Orange contract I was taking - all queries were promptly and efficiently answered by their staff, emails informed me of every step of the ordering and dispatch process, and the phone arrived via Royal Mail at 7 a.m. the morning after. It's unfortunate that it's the examples of good customer service stand out when it should be unusual to get bad service, but all kudos to mobiles.co.uk for an incredibly enjoyable and efficient ordering experience. Unlike my bad experiences with o2, for example, for whom the term 'customer service' is a foul and dirty phrase not to be used in polite company.

And then to the ridiculous; Yesterday evening saw Tara and I meeting up to celebrate our friend Ruths 30th birthday. We were meeting for a meal at Singers Bar & Bistro at the Ricoh arena which would then be followed by spending the rest of the evening at the nearby Isle Casino. After having a few drinks at the bar, we sat down to eat. We were presented with a disappointly brief one page food menu (which, I note from the link above where a .pdf file of one can be viewed is completely different to the options we had last night).

I ordered garlic mushrooms on toast as a starter, followed by pan fried saffron marinated chicken in a chorizo and bean cassoulet for main.

As the starters began filtering out to the table, nobody had even come to the table asking us what drinks we wanted. Members of the party had to scour the place looking for the wine menu - It was only when we asked a waitress to do so that they actually asked us what drinks we wanted; By now, we'd been making our own way to the bar to buy our own thus making her requests redundant at this stage.

The starter? Garlic mushrooms were nice, but so I'd expect for six quid for a small plate of fungi. Unfortunately they didn't provide me with a steak knife, so I'm unable to comment on the stale piece of toast that accompanied it - no way was my measly dinner knife cutting through this hardened beast. Complaints were made; Waiter told us there was no more toast so came back with a small of plate of croutons - by which time, all of us with the same starter had finished all the mushrooms (We'd waited for so long for the starters to arrive, we were all half starved at this stage), so they were quite unnecessary.

The main courses began arriving on tables - well, some of them, at any rate. Steaks were delivered cooked to the wrong requirements with the wrong sauce or no sauce at all (or in the case of our friend Hannah, the sauce arrived in a small espresso cup but the steak sadly didn't arrive for another hour, and even then at the end of the evening when we were all ready to leave - and to add insult to injury, her well done steak was quite, quite rare). Our friend Chandra had a fly in her lamb; "Don't say it out loud or everyone will want one".

My pan-fried Chicken in Cassoulet? The chicken was overcooked and dry, and the heat varied in the cassoulet depending on which quarter of it I approached. Tepid, cold or just right. The Cassoulet was dotted with evil bullets of rock hard chorizo which must have been hardening on a shelf in the sun for six months. Many of our party had been regularly complaining to the staff - we were now at the stage when half of us had finished our meals and meals still hadn't arrived - or had arrived and had been sent back. The menu only had eight options on it, for Christs sake, and none of these were what you could term complex dishes - how easier could it be to get them all out on time?

In the end we only paid what we thought the meal was worth. They gave us free champagne - small consolation - and we all walked out almost four hours after we'd gone in confident that we wouldn't darken their doorstep again. Awful, awful place. The small consolation is the hard worked staff were all a great bunch - odd how the management vanished though the second our complaints became more vocal.

"Our opening times are as follows and booking is recommended for dinner to avoid disappointment"? More like "Our opening times are as follows and we recommending avoiding dinner to avoid disappointment".

As for the Casino? I'm not a gambling man, but people watching is always fun. Watched some guy lose around 600 quid on the roulette tables. Wesley Snipes gave him a bad tip. Gambling idiot.

We'll drink and drink at these gigs

Courtesy of Tara and her place of work, we were lucky enough to get VIP tickets to see The Enemy perform at the Ricoh Arena last Saturday. I must admit I'm not a fan, having only heard a few of their songs on the radio, but we had no other plans for the evening and an evening of corporate hospitality sounded entertaining enough.

There was a little confusion when we turned up whether we were actually allowed in the VIP section or not, but shortly afterwards the organiser turned up - and armed with our "Corporate Hospitality Guest" lanyards we found ourselves entering the hallowed sanctum of ridiculously excessive corporate budgets..

The hospitality was taking place in a very nice area of the Ricoh called The Jaguar Rooms. A bottle of Red and chilled white already sitting on the table, complete with a buffet and a free bar all evening. After a few hours of chatting with Tara and her work friends, having doors opened for us and basically being treated like, well, VIPs all evening, I'd almost forgotten there was a band playing. We briefly checked out on the two support bands (going in via the exclusive VIP area and not queueing up, obviously) but the free drinks in the Jaguar Rooms (and the mystery of why Jon Gaunt was in the VIP rooms) were way more appealing.

I am usually uncomfortable with being waited on. It often makes me feel guilty when people do things for me that I'm perfectly capable of doing for myself, and I felt like a fraud. I half expected security to come wandering in at any second, point at me yelling "He's the one!" and dragging me out of the room by my lanyard and depositing me with all of the other concert-goers - I'm ashamed to say though after a few hours of this I realised I could become quite accustomed to nights like this..!

And The Enemy themselves? They sounded like a Sixth form Jam tribute act put together for a second rate Battle of the Bands competition. Either the accoustics in the venue were terrible or the Lead singer genuinely does mumble like he has a mouthful of cotton wool -

"Mmmfff bmmmmf mmmmf Coventry!"
*cue huge cheers*
"Mmmff bmmmf good to be back mmmmf mmmmf bmmmmf Ricoh!"
*More huge cheers*
"Mmmmmf bmmmf mmmmmf we wish we were The Jam! mmmmf bmmmmmf"

Actually, I may have made that last line up.

Credit to them, it must have been great playing for a home crowd like that, but I still prefer The Specials.