Coventry have become the Championship’s ‘nearly team’ over the last few seasons.<\/p>\n
Each of their last three campaigns has ended in heartbreak, with a play-off final defeat in 2023 against Luton Town, the penalty shoot-out loss to Manchester United in the 2024 FA Cup semi-final and then the last-gasp play-off agony to Sunderland in May.<\/p>\n
Nine starters here were involved in that cruel finish at the Stadium of Light when Dan Ballard’s injury-time header took the Black Cats to Wembley, as the Sky Blues attempt to use that sense of hurt to power them on this campaign.<\/p>\n
Only goalkeeper Carl Rushworth, on loan from Brighton and Hove Albion, was making his debut so they will hope their continuity can help them in a division surrounded by sides trying to rebuild with new bosses and new players.<\/p>\n
They picked up 35 points from their 15 home games under Lampard as the basis for their play-off push but they will feel this was two points dropped.<\/p>\n
If they want to make a concerted promotion push, they need a better start than in those three previous years when they have been playing catch-up almost from the off.<\/p>\n
But for the fourth season in a row, they failed to win their opening game.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Coventry have become the Championship’s ‘nearly team’ over the last few seasons. Each of their last three campaigns…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":70425,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[69],"tags":[403,99],"class_list":["post-70424","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-soccer","tag-soccer","tag-sports"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70424","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=70424"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/70424\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/70425"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=70424"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=70424"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=70424"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}