Coventry City’s long wait for a Premier League win is over. Jay Dasilva’s goal settled Saturday’s game against Nottingham Forest at the City Ground, ending a drought that stretched back more than 25 years — 9,287 days, to be exact, since the club last won a match in English football’s top flight.
That previous victory came in April 2001, when John Hartson headed the winner in a 1-0 win over Sunderland in front of 20,946 fans at Highfield Road for Gordon Strachan’s side. Coventry were relegated at the end of the 2000-01 campaign, and their last Premier League goal before Dasilva’s had come from Mustapha Hadji in a 3-2 defeat by Aston Villa on 5 May 2001. The three points also carried Coventry to 100 Premier League victories, having been stranded on 99 for more than a quarter of a century.
The years in between were turbulent. After relegation, Coventry spent 11 seasons in the second tier before dropping into League One in 2012, a period that also brought points deductions and a spell in administration. The club left Highfield Road in 2005 and in 2013 became embroiled in a bitter dispute over the Ricoh Arena and its rent. At their lowest ebb they were forced to play matches away from Coventry, at Northampton Town, before falling into the fourth tier for the first time in 59 years in 2017. For those supporters who lived through it, the emotion at the full-time whistle at the City Ground was unmistakable.
Manager Frank Lampard, whose side had come into the match off the back of a 5-0 drubbing at home by Brighton, was pleased with far more than the result. “It’s been a tough opening for us, so those first Premier League points feel great,” he told BBC Radio 5 Live. “I thought the players were brilliant. The fight, work ethic and togetherness but also the tactical side of it. They dug and fought for each other which is what you need to win a Premier League game.”
Speaking to BBC Match of the Day, Lampard highlighted what the win meant for a squad still finding its feet at the highest level. “It’s really important for some of the players,” he said. “For many of them it is their debut in the Premier League, they haven’t been here before and they need to feel like they belong and play like that.”
Lampard acknowledged that his players will need thick skins to come through the slog of a Premier League season, with avoiding relegation the campaign’s main aim — and that made a win following such a heavy home defeat all the more rewarding. “There are lots of things we can learn and sometimes this year we may take those hits, it’s a reality for teams that get to the Premier League,” he added. “It’s important we overcome them in terms of how we take it on board and stay together. It is easy to point in different directions when you lose but the group’s really strong, really together, there’ll have a good feeling from this one. But we’ll keep our feet on the ground because it is one win, but it was needed for us.”