Fair enough, I stand corrected.
I wonder how many supporters of clubs like Swindon would have swapped 47 48 years of bumbling around the lower leagues with the regular near misses and actual promotions & relegations for all Coventry's years in the top flight, apparently much more illustrious and high profile but probably in the end frustrating and even tedious. Not me.
From our early glory days of the Southern League, before the Great War, up until the mid 60's Cov were a regular opponent, apart from the odd season. Pretty much 50/50 in the wins stakes. It was then that Jimmy Hill got them up, whereas we went back down from the old Div 2, not to see each other again in a league fixture for 30 years until the Prem.
So their older fans knew all about being down in the lower reaches.
That they managed to survive as long as they did was something of a miracle as they were never really much more than a Div 3 club.... look back on some of the sides who consistently managed to scrape out of relegation and they had some proper mediocre squads.
Had Jimmy's stewardship not happened, it's likely that Cov would be up there with our most played opponents.... the worry for us, is that the top dozen or so of these, have all to some extent left us behind. In some cases quite a long way behind.
The only one in Div 4 is Exeter, who weigh in about 14th in the list, and currently we're below them.
This doesn't thrill me...