Am sure there must be other Sky Blues or Hatters’ fans here who’ll be tuning in
at 4.45.
After the well-documented torrid times the two teams have endured these last
two decades (Luton getting relegated out of the league) and Cov getting booted
out of their own ground for two full seasons and more), few fans would begrudge
either club their thoroughly well-deserved moments in the Wembley sun. Given
the way he has taken a club that its hedge fund owners had smashed to pieces,
Sky Blues manager. Mark Robins, has achieved Godlike status in Nov.
Either way, given the two teams’ playing styles – fast and skillful (Cov) vs big and powerful (Luton), it promises an intriguing (and hopefully exciting) face-off whose romance is the
Very essence of what footie used to be about.
All things being equal and leaving aside potentially stupid VAR rulings, would imagine the fans of whichever team loses out on today’s estimated £170,000,000 jackpot will be making their rival team the EPL result they’ll be watching out for come this August.
PUSB!
A good friend of mine supports Luton so I will be cheering on the Hatters. Being an Ipswich fan has been bad enough but the Luton supporter experience in the last 20 years has been a helluva rollercoaster ride. Perhaps Ipswich will rampage their way to the PL next year…?
As my local club I will be cheering on the Hatters. A proper football club run the right way and given their size hugely over achieving as a result. I will miss watching my team ( the mighty Millers) playing there next season though.
I can’t imagine what the likes of Arsenal or Man City fans will think about the facilities – the ground is a throwback to the 60/70s with standing in the away end. Personally I love that; the toilets not so much.
Another Ipswich fan here but with a bit of a soft spot for both clubs. Remember the exciting Luton team of the 80’s an of course the iconic Coventry kit which seems to have been replicated this season.
Will be some story for whoever makes it though Luton’s ground would surely be a boon and a hindrance.
I’m keeping my feet on the ground for next season @black-celebration but I’m quietly impressed by our owners.
P.S. Also, come on Dortmund!
Richard Osman has just called it ‘ the greatest footballing occasion of the year’, so that’s nice.
Probably won’t watch, but – as an ex-Coventry resident, I will be keeping my fingers crossed for the Sky Blues.
Good luck to them both. I’m a neutral but know a few Luton fans so would prefer them to win, but won’t be disappointed if they don’t. It will be tough for the losers though. The gulf between the PL and the EFL will make the 3 relegated teams favourites to go straight back up.
@Alias
The Championship is an incredibly hard division to get out of
It’s not unknown for teams who get relegated from the EPL to drop out of the Championship in the next couple of seasons
i know, but given that whichever 3 out of Southampton, Leeds, Leicester and Everton go down, they are all clubs who have been in the PL for a few years. They will have the financial muscle to buy the best squads and will be better able to attract experienced and ambitious young Championship players than the other clubs.
Financial muscle?
Everton are flat broke and Soton and Leicester both have to sell their best players to survive. Leeds have been a basket case club for several years now
Despite the parachute payments, all four clubs will almost certainly have to sell their best and therefore highest paid players to stay financially afloat
https://www.theguardian.com/football/2023/may/26/everton-leicester-leeds-why-relegation-candidates-in-mess-damage-premier-league
Leeds are actually not in a bad state financially, when compared with Leicester and Everton, and are far from being a financial basket case. Off the pitch at any rate.
You’ve sold it to me but it’s not on terrestrial.
I – 0 Luton ht. plus 2 disallowed. Their talisman defender Lockyer off with an in injury.
Absorbing game so far.
Cov coming back strongly after Luton dominated
most of the play.
Good that Tom Lockyer seems to be OK
One way traffic so far. Very disappointed with Coventry’s performance in the first half. Better to go out with a bang than a whimper.
What sport is this?
Quidditch
Great second half.
Given what’s at stake, hope it gets settled in ET
rather than go to penalties (both teams having
lost their last three shoot outs)
Just re-read your o.p.
£170 million!
You could have a coronation and still have £10,000,000 change
Luton, if they win, should thank the Lord they don’t play Rugby Union – no way would they get to play cheaty-cheaty-ever-so-cheaty Saracens or Harlequins (see description of Saracens) playing at Kenilworth Road.
A draconian approach to promotion has made Rugby a closed shop. Very silly. And they’re dropping like files … Worcester, London Irish, Wasps … as I say, very silly.
Soon, it’ll just be Saracens v. Harlequins. That’ll be good.
Luton or Coventry – hope they do well next season … or just stuff Tottenham, Chelsea et al on their way back down.
Shame to see this go to penalties
Bloody hell.
Bloody hell!
Poor sod. A miss that just cost his team about £25 million .Well done Luton though, quite a story. Looking forward to the big 6 visiting the crumbling outside toilet that is Kenilworth Road.
£25 million? Add another £105 million to that!
Err, add another £40 million to that £130 million.
Great game.
Shit way for it to end.
Poor Dabo
Fair play and good luck to Luton in the EPL.
come August.
Hope Cov won’t need the play offs a year from
now
I’ve just seen the result. Fair play to Luton but I was really hoping for a Coventry City victory. Why? Mark Robins is a good manager and a decent man he was also a favourite of mine when I used to attend every Man Utd match.
Whoever won will be favourites to go back down again but you never know, good luck to Luton Town. I remember watching Man Utd in league and cup games at Kenilworth Road entering the ground through that gap in the terraced houses, it’s a very strange stadium.
The son-in-law will be very gloomy tonight.
He shouldn’t be.
If he’d been offered a place in the play off final last August,
he’d have bitten your arm off. Even more so if you made
your offer when they were rock bottom of the division at the
start of Oct.
Mark Robins has done a brilliant job for CCFC and an equally
Impressive job for the city itself.
And best of all, no more SISU hedge fund ownership
I’ve just been reading more of the story of both teams. It really was a fairy tale for both clubs and I reckon either team would have been the choice of 99% of all neutral fans vs. any other club in todays play-off.
For Luton Town to having risen from the National League 9 years ago to the Premier League is a bloody miracle and gives hope to every other team from The Championship all the way down to the National League. I reckon McElhenney & Reynolds will be dreaming tonight.
Good luck to Rob Edwards’s team next season and I hope Mark Robins can lead The Sky Blues*** to automatic promotion next season.
***As opposed to the ‘Noisy Neighbours’
Pleased to see Dan Potts turning out again for Coventry. His dad is a West Ham legend, and I saw him play a couple of times. Can’t believe he’s now 29 and 8 years in to his time at Luton.
As a former longtime Luton resident I was pleased they won. Paradoxically, when I oiled there, much if not most of their support came from people who lived outside of the town. The taint by association with Tommy Robinson and his cronies presumably turned off many locals, although I saw a few black and Asian faces in the crowd yesterday, so perhaps things hqve moved on a bit.
Anyway, it’s amusing to compile a list of the notionally bigger clubs that have won nowt in the decades since Coventry won the FA Cup and Luton the League Cup the following year ( 1988). Since when, of course, Luton have gone down to the National League and back again. The list includes Newcastle, West Ham, Wolves, Sheffield United, Sunderland, Palace, and a number of others who might consider themselves bigger, like Stoke, West Brom and Southampton.
Let’s not forget Wimbledon beat Liverpool 1-0 the year after that magnificent 3-2 Cov – Spurs final of 1987
Noel Gallagher’s mocking of Tottenham when they were included in that European Super League breakaway move a few years ago wasn’t entirely without merit.
I’ll try and work out a specific number over the summer – you have to include the dropping out of the “Champions” League into the Europa League as two entries, and it can get confusing – but I think Tottenham must have entered about 80 competitions without winning one, about 120 competitions and only won one (the League Cup), and about 180 competitions and only won two (two League Cups) … but hey … it’s the taking part that counts.
Indeed, Spurs haven’t won the league title in my lifetime, over 60 years. I think Burnley won it the year before Spurs did the double.
@deramdaze
@ernietothecentreoftheearth
Interesting to compare the fates of two of the three teams that got relegated out of the EPL in. May 2001.
Cov got taken over by a hedge fund, eventually going into a tailspin and having suffered points deduction after points deduction dropped all the way down the leagues.
Man City got added to a portfolio of 13 clubs owned. by Arab billionaires and are now winning pretty much everything in sight. Along the way, the club and its owners have chalked up something like 110 alleged breaches of EUFA’s largely toothless FFP rules.
The Mancs’ have also “done a Chelski” and gamed the market. by spunking. up some £100,000,000 on 36 talented youngsters they wasted no time farmed out to clubs in their group.
Hard to see a club like Leicester ever repeating their amazing feat of seven years back.
Excellent article by Martin Samuel in yesterday’s Sunset Times about how the rewards of reaching the Champions League are heavily biased in favor of the big European Super League clubs
Be nice to think that Everton might do more than simply exist following their win today … I wouldn’t put money on it.
I wanted Leicester to stay up as they are the only team to have done anything truly out of the ordinary in the Premier League since its formation in 1992. Just for that I rather think they deserved it more.
I can only really see two possible futures for Everton at the moment:
1. Torino: They become a team whose main objective at the beginning of the season is mid-table safety. They have a points tally in mind, and employ a manager designed to accumulate those. That doesn’t mean they necessarily become a negative team: Brentford and Brighton operate like this, and manage to play decent football. At the same time, they are very much the junior partner in their city, no matter how great their past was.
2. Newcastle: Somebody buys them. Somebody with plenty of money who sees a famous premier league team as an opportunity. For soft power. For whatever. Somebody who you probably don’t want to own your club. Maybe really don’t want to own your club. Then the objective changes and you’re looking at challenging for trophies again.
I’m not sure there’s a middle way for a club like Everton. Or am I missing something?
Unfashionable … but one thing they could do is announce in advance that they’ll go all out to win the League Cup or F.A. Cup, actually advertising the fact that they will field full-strength teams for every single game in those competitions.
Why not?
They’re not in Europe – they play twenty fewer games than Manchester United – and over the last few decades there has been little in football (actually, nothing in football) more pathetic than Everton, Newcastle (last domestic trophy – that’ll be before Elvis’s first 45 in the UK) et al fielding weakened teams in Cups only to finish 11th in the Premier League anyway. Grow a pair.
That “grow a pair” line refers to Everton, not Hawkfall …
Too late.
He’s already on his way over to your house
He won’t find me, I’m still on the 5.20 reading the Pink ‘un.
I think the teams that deserved to be relegated have.
Leicester need to sell a lot of their players to get their wages bill down plus many are out of contract now. I can’t see them coming back soon.
Leeds…who knows!