Dear WSC
Neil Reynolds (WSC 180) thinks it inconceivable that Lee Hughes should choose to leave West Brom for Coventry for footballing reasons, but I think he should consider the facts at the time that decision was made rather than the current league table.
When Hughes signed for Coventry we were rated as second favourites by most bookmakers to be promoted back to the Premiership. Just about every pundit considered us to be more likely to get promotion than the Baggies and at the point of Hughes’s signature the full extent of Coventry’s debts had not yet been made public. These are the footballing reasons. We were considered to have a better team than West Brom. The fact that West Brom have a bigger stadium and higher attendances are not footballing reasons. The fact is that Hughes would have felt that he was more likely to get promotion with Coventry than with Albion.The real gist of this is that fans of some of the other Midlands clubs cannot accept the fact that Coventry have been a more successful club for the last 15-20 years and that this may be the reason we have been able to lure their players away (Birmingham – Liam Daish and Gary Breen; Wolves – Steve Froggatt; Baggies – Hughes) so they choose to believe that the players can only have been influenced by financial considerations. To borrow Neil Reynolds’s warthog analogy, that doesn’t wash either.
Ian Hossack, via email
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Stories
The blueprint for the European Cup was laid down in pre-war Budapest, Vienna and Prague. Cris Freddi recalls the mayhem and magnificence of the Mitropa
The name derives from Mittel Europa (central Europe) and the Cup was the baby of Hugo Meisl, international referee turned secretary of the Austrian FA and manager of the national team. After the Second World War, it couldn’t compete with first the Latin Cup, then UEFA’s three major club competitions and, although it staggered on in one form or another until 1992, ended up no better than an Intertoto.