Coventry suffer Premier League’s ultimate indignity: they are measurably worse than Spurs

Coventry, a side that had taken their total attempts on goal to 39 for a return of zero actual goals, were probably already feeling like luck was not on their side even before Lewis Dunk scored an absurd 30-yard screamer that fizzed and dipped its way under the crossbar for the fourth of Brighton’s five goals.

It really is hard to imagine how the start of this season could have gone any worse for Coventry. The fixture list was not kind to them, but it’s not just their own desperate struggles that make it all look so grim.

While they sit on zero points and zero goals, their fellow promoted clubs – clubs who were simply not on their level in the Championship last season – have already racked up 14 points and 12 goals between them.

The early success of those teams already makes survival look near impossible for Coventry, who must now also suffer the ultimate indignity of finding themselves as bad as only Tottenham when it comes to scoring Premier League goals.

It feels like there could be some kind of curse at work here. That someone gave a Coventry fan a monkey’s paw 10 years ago and said ‘A decade from now you will be just like Tottenham’.

They have, in fairness, taken a different path to the same outcome this season. Spurs, aware that they have no finisher in their expensively assembled squad at all, have shown all their nous and experience by simply not wasting any time or effort on creating chances at all. It’s just easier that way.

Silly, callow, naïve Coventry have not been so canny. They have foolishly highlighted the scale of their inadequacies in front of goal by creating a great many chances. Several of them against Manchester City, for goodness’ sake.

Coventry’s xG in what was in the end a harrowing 4-0 defeat to a very good Brighton side was 1.72. There can’t be many times in a 5-0 game where the victorious keeper gets man of the match for his unlikely clean sheet.

And this was a game that showed just about more clearly than any other this season the obvious, trite yet no less meaningful fact that goals change games.

Charalampos Kostoulas’ superbly taken opening goal on 35 minutes came, ludicrous as it feels to say it given the final scoreline, entirely against the run of play.

Coventry were much the better side at that point, having already had eight attempts and forcing that eventual man of the match Verbruggen into significant action on more than one occasion.

But while the scope of the defeat was no doubt influenced by Taiwo Awoniyi’s red card eight minutes into the second half, the contest was over by then. There was absolutely no sense that Coventry had it within them to recover from 2-0 down.

While Coventry’s attacking misfortune will obviously garner the most attention, they were also startlingly open at the back. That’s where the real agony lies, because there were legitimate positives to be taken from last week’s all-round effort even in defeat at Manchester City. Those were p*ssed away here.

There is a clear desire, bordering on desperation, in the football media for none of this to be Frank Lampard’s fault. The language used around a struggling side is always interesting. At half-time here, Roy Keane noted that Frank would be disappointed. Oddly for a man whose catchphrase is quite literally ‘That’s his job’ there was no indication that Coventry not being a disappointing football team might in some way be, well, his job. But reality can be ignored for only so long. If things don’t change soon, a beleaguering is inevitable.

Brighton were superb, though. Once they got in front and sensed blood, they really did look like a top-quality side. The early stages of this season always felt like a huge opportunity for Brighton, a team approaching the new season with what is this year a rare sense of equilibrium and continuity. They have taken that early chance and now sit cosily inside the top four and are comfortably the division’s leading scorers having racked up 13 more goals than Coventry in the first four games of the season.

There is nothing unsustainable about Brighton’s start to the season, which doesn’t necessarily feel like the case for everyone else currently breathing rarefied air. This is a season of huge opportunity for them.

Coventry can only take comfort from the fact that the only other team to endure a pointless and goalless four-game start to a Premier League season were 2017/18’s Crystal Palace (who didn’t actually get either goals or points on the board until game eight amid The De Boer Unpleasantness) and they still finished 11th.

But still finishing 11th after a bad start is about the most Crystal Palace-coded thing of which it’s possible to conceive. They’re literally on their way to finishing 11th after a bad start right now.

Coventry have no such status and, with 10 goals conceded, are right now technically and statistically twice as bad as Spurs, which really shouldn’t actually be possible.