By Jim Brown
For the first time in many seasons Coventry City fans did not see wholesale changes in Jimmy McIntyre’s first team at the start of the 1929-30 season. The manager was satisfied that the team he had developed the previous season was capable of an assault on the Division Three South championship. The side included the mid-season signings of Jimmy Loughlin, Billy Lake and Billy Pick and the one signing he did make was Jimmy Baker, a Wolves reserve wing half who showed a lot of promise.
The season started with a bang with five wins and two draws in an unbeaten seven match run including three away wins, that took the Bantams to the top of the table. The bubble burst in front of an 18,000 plus Highfield Road crowd at the end of September when Bournemouth snatched a 2-0 win and then four successive games were lost in October and City were eight points adrift from the runaway league leaders Plymouth.
The wheels were back on the track by December however and a seven game unbeaten run included 26 goals as Loughlin and Lake hit top form. On Christmas morning in front of a new record crowd of 26,400 City inflicted Plymouth’s first defeat of the season, 1-0, with Loughlin grabbing the vital goal.
After almost twenty years without any real FA Cup success the Bantams reached the Third Round, the win over Bath set up a plum tie with Sunderland on 11 January 1930. For the most attractive game at the ground since the end of the war there was a record crowd of 31,673 with receipts added up to £1854– a tidy sum to help the club’s coffers.
City’s good home form continued after the Cup exit – they won ten and drew one in the league at home between November and April with Lake and Loughlin regular scorers. The away form let them down however and in the same period they lost ten consecutive away games culminating in a 2-10 hammering at Norwich – the first and only time the club have conceded double figures in a Football League game.
City ended the season in sixth place with 47 points, twenty-one points behind champions Plymouth, but easily the highest points total since entry into the League in 1919. A settled forward line of Richards, Widdowson, Loughlin, Lake and Pick helped themselves to a club record 84 league goals with Jimmy Loughlin, in his first full season, netting 28 goals in all competitions – another club record. Despite the improved position, good Cup run and the large Christmas Day crowd, the average gate was down over 2,000 at 12,985.
