By Jim Brown
Coventry City’s second season in the Football League saw no improvement on the pitch. Despite keeping the team up in the horrendous first season, manager Harry Pollitt had been sacked and replaced by Albert Evans, a member of Aston Villa’s double winning team of 1897. The side were bottom of the table for most of the season but in an almost carbon copy finish of the previous season, six wins and two draws from their final nine games hauled them out of the dreaded last position. They ended the season 21st out of 22 but avoided relegation to the newly formed Third Division as only one team were demoted.
32 different players were used by manager Evans who gradually jettisoned the majority of the players he inherited from Pollitt. By the end of the second season only George Chaplin remained of the team that had taken the field in the first league game in August 1919.
The season started well with a 3-2 win at Rotherham but nine games without a win left City at the foot of the table and it was uphill all the way. One of the best results came at Christmas against Cardiff. On Christmas Day the Welsh team, who looked good bets for promotion, won 4-2 at Highfield Road in a one-sided game. Two days later City travelled to Ninian Park for the return and got their revenge with Bill ‘Mollie’ Morgan scoring the only goal.
Morgan, an experienced left-sided player, had been signed from Birmingham two months previously and was a key player in the relegation battle. A young goalkeeper named Jerry Best made his debut in the Christmas Day game and despite letting in four soon became a massive favourite with City supporters but not before he let in seven goals at West Ham on New Years Day. Other key players in the resurgence after Christmas were local-born defender Reg Dalton and centre-half Bert Millard. The man who really pulled City out of the mire however was centre-forward Sammy Stevens. Signed from Notts County for a club record £1,300 in mid March he scored only three goals in eleven games but only two were lost as his partnership with Morgan clicked. Two of the goals came at Barnsley in a 2-2 draw which virtually ensured safety.
In the FA Cup City once again struggled against non-league opposition and after a 1-1 home draw with Rochdale they travelled to Lancashire and lost the replay.
The novelty of league football ensured crowds held up and the average attendance even increased to 16,992 with the highest 22,800, recorded for the local derby with Birmingham in December with further 20,000 gates against Leicester, Rotherham and Stoke.
1920 saw the formation of the Coventry City Supporters Club and within six months over 1000 members had been recruited with social events and trips to away games being organised. In early 1921 the Supporters Club and the Football Club formed a Joint Council to work in unison for the betterment of the Football Club. At an early meeting of the Joint Council in March 1921 there was a proposal to introduce a scheme to raise finance for a cover over the ‘popular side’ (the west end).
