Middle row (l-r); John Craven, Chris Cattlin, Bill Glazier, Mick Coop, Neil Ramsbottom, Dennis Mortimer, Brian Alderson
Front row (l-r); Alan Green, Alan Dugdale, Colin Stein, Gordon Milne (Manager), Wilf Smith, Tommy Hutchison, Willie Carr
By Jim Brown
Gordon Milne continued his team rebuilding in the summer of 1973 by signing his old Blackpool team-mate John Craven, a tough tackling midfielder from Crystal Palace for a modest £42,500.
Willie Carr’s time at Coventry was also coming to an end. We did not know it at the time, but the knee injury suffered in April 1973 would be the start of a long injury spell for Willie. Coventry surprisingly agreed to sell him to arch rivals Wolves in the middle of the 1973-74 season, with a fee of £240,000 agreed. However, Carr failed a medical on account of his knee and the deal was called off. Wolves got their man a year later but for a vastly reduced fee and Willie played on for many years.
The season started well and for the first ten games the City were handily placed in the top five, their unchanged team playing bold attacking football. There were excellent home victories against Liverpool, Tottenham, Manchester City and Derby and after a 2-0 win at Leicester they went second in the table. Hutchison’s fantastic form earned him a call-up for Scotland and, later, a place in Willie Ormond’s squad for the 1974 World Cup finals in Germany. Home crowds too, were up, averaging around 25,000, and a good season seemed to be in prospect. Even a place in Europe did not seem too fanciful.
As summer turned into autumn everything started to turn sour. An injury to Craven, coupled with other enforced changes, disrupted the flow of the team. Goals, always a scarce commodity, dried up completely, and six successive goal-less league games expunged all hopes of a successful league season. It took a plunge into the transfer market to help arrest the slide. David Cross, the Norwich striker, was signed for £150,000.
The winter of 1973 is remembered in political terms as the winter of discontent, a period when the Conservative Prime Minister Edward Heath took on the then mighty coal-miners in an industrial dispute that ended in defeat for the government in an early 1974 election. Football at large was heavily disrupted for three months by the miners’ strike, which saw Heath’s government implement the ‘three-day week’. In early November a State of Emergency came into force and to avoid the use of floodlights Saturday games had to kick-off at 2.15 pm with League Cup matches having to be played on midweek afternoons. These problems coincided with a compelling run in the League Cup. Following victories over Darlington and Bristol City, the home tie with Stoke City in November went ahead only with the assistance of generators borrowed from the local Massey Ferguson factory. Despite a blown fuse just before the kick-off, City were able to negotiate the gloom to progress to the next round, over 17,000 watching a 2-1 win.
Needless to say, all this had an adverse effect on attendances, with cup replays attracting only half the usual gate. City negotiated the twin roads to Wembley with admirable pluck, stumbling in unfortunate circumstances on both journeys. The League Cup march equalled their longest ever run in the competition and they faced eventual winners Manchester City in the quarter-finals. The game was played at Highfield Road on a Wednesday afternoon in December, in front of a lowly 12,000, and ended 2-2. In the replay two goals from Brian Alderson carried the team to within twelve minutes of that first elusive semi-final but then three Manchester City goals ended the Wembley dream.
One consequence of the three-day week was that the Football League finally agreed to allow clubs to play on Sundays. In January City staged their first ever Sunday game, a Fourth round FA Cup-tie with Derby County and a 0-0 draw attracted a crowd of over 41,000 but City won the replay 1-0 after extra-time under generator-powered floodlights. City were destined for another late show with surprise team of the season QPR in Round 5. After a 1-1 draw at Highfield Road the gates were closed at a packed Loftus Road for their fifth cup replay of the season and City were seconds from extra-time when Stan Bowles’ free-kick sent them out.
The rest of the league season was anti-climactic, with the final placing of sixteenth not really doing justice to some of the early season performances. It was the first season of three up and three down and the most fiercely fought First division for years, thankfully relegation was never a threat for City. City’s crowds slipped by around 5% – averaging 23,280 – much in line with the national trend.
City’s third and final Texaco Cup ended at the first hurdle when they lost 2-4 on aggregate to Motherwell, for the second season running. Over 9,000 watched the first leg at Coventry and jeered City’s players off at the final whistle, well beaten by a team containing former City player Bobby Graham and managed by another old boy Ian St John.
