Doug King admits he finally ‘felt’ Coventry City’s imminent return to the Premier League at the weekend.
And after dominating the division for most of the season, the club’s owner believes it would be fitting for the Sky Blues to do it in style by going up as champions.
Given how close Frank Lampard’s men are to sealing their automatic promotion, now sitting 11 points clear of third and fourth placed Ipswich and Millwall, and nine ahead of second placed Middlesbrough, it would take a disastrous run of results to fail with just seven games to go.
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Asked if he can taste promotion, the executive chairman touched the wooden table in front of him and said: “I would say I felt it at Swansea a bit, just because I thought it was a real, high quality professional performance when they knew what was at stake.
“Yeah, the results in the day had obviously gone our way to a good degree, and then it was a moment where do you just take your foot off the gas and think, I’m OK, I have got a bit of a free hit, or do I go and enforce what I’m trying to do here?
“And I felt the performance was as good as I’ve seen us deliver at that moment. And I know the head coach was really pleased with how they handled that. So for me that was like, we have a very good team and they’re all on it.”
Speaking to CoventryLive, he added: “It’s a tough place to go. We haven’t been great at Swansea. I know we won there previously 2-0 but I felt on Saturday, we fancy this, we’re gonna do this. Yeah, I did.”
As for whether he wants to finish the season in style by going up as champions, the 59-year-old said: “I think obviously having been at the top of the table for most of the season and with the gap that we have now, I know the boys would want to finish that off properly.
“I mean, there’s seven games left and you can calculate the points. And it’s 21 to play for so there is still a job to be done and you can’t play the game until the game is played.
“So it’s all perception and everybody sort of, you know, giving all their different rhymes and reasons for what could happen. But I think in general when we have, in my view, been the best team in the league this year it would be fitting for us to go up as champions.
“But we know that teams can go on crazy runs late in the season. Middlesbrough won six in a row not too long ago. But I believe that the team is a strong squad with what was added in January, with Frank (Onyeka) coming in, with Romain (Esse) coming in and others. And I think the depth now allows us to really treat every game as a one off and not sort of nurse anything. And I think that’s positive, obviously, for trying to be champions.”
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Looking back to the start of the season, did he envisage being in this position back in August?
“I’d say no,” he said. “I thought we’d have a good season. I thought it would be disappointing for us not to make the play-offs just because we had kept the main squad together, who’d been trending on extremely good form since Frank (Lampard) came in in November of 2024.
“We’d added to that squad, we’d shuffled a bit. And we had a proper pre-season with the head coach, and it was it was a good pre-season. It was an intense one, the boys worked really hard. I think they knew the patterns of play they wanted to sort of put together and I think therefore we came in, I would say, well organised and ready after a good period of nearly over half a season where we’d worked out how to get where we wanted to go.”
He added: “There was quite a lot of flux in our competitors, which obviously I keep an eye on just what they’re up to. Obviously I saw the Sheffield United changes and I saw what Southampton did. So from my viewpoint, I felt that we would be a very competitive play-off team.
“Obviously we’ve never finished higher than fifth. Could we be third or fourth and get the second semi-final at home? I felt that was eminently achievable.”
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