“Respect Coventry, please,” said Pep Guardiola on Saturday evening when a presumptuous TV reporter asked Manchester City’s manager about the prospect of another all-Manchester FA Cup final. Guardiola knew Coventry City would be no pushovers for Manchester United in Sunday’s semi-final, yet even he couldn’t have envisaged how close they would drag Erik ten Hag’s side towards ruin in the most scintillating and sickening football experience of my life.
I’ve watched plenty of Coventry defeats down the years – enough to become desensitised to it, I thought. I cried at Villa Park when we were relegated from the Premier League in 2001; I watched from the press box with weary resignation as Doncaster consigned us to League One in 2012; and I experienced mixed emotions when Luton denied us a Premier League berth last May. But seeing us lose to United at Wembley after a preposterous three-goal comeback was an entirely new kind of trauma.
Strangely, it was a dire first-half performance from Coventry, one in which we looked unnecessarily fearful of our opponents. It was only when Mark Robins changed formation and brought on Victor Torp and Fábio Tavares that we began to realise United were fragile, even at 3-0 up. The first two goals, from Ellis Simms and Callum O’Hare, were celebrated in the upper tiers of Wembley, where I was sat, with a mixture of pride and excitement. The third brought delirium. I even turned to my dad after Haji Wright’s 95th-minute penalty and declared: “I don’t care what happens next because this has already been unreal.”
Who was I kidding? When Torp’s “goal” in the final seconds of extra time was unexpectedly disallowed for the most fractional offside possible, I was bereft. There can be nothing crueller in football than believing for an entire minute that your side have completed arguably the greatest comeback in FA Cup history, never mind qualifying for the final for the first time in 37 years, only for it to be looted from you.
