Harry The Dog was very strong on Charlton to go through after talking to four (4) Wycombe fans.
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Has he a few bob again after the snooker?
The Brisbane Broncos are his cliff team at the minute.
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The Valley is a great ground. Charlton were a solid Premier League club throughout my childhood. Alan Curbishly hasn’t been the same since he left in 2006.
Great?
Lamps has Coventry purring
The top 6 managers in the Championship table are all English or Welsh. They’re all English actually but some of them were Taffy granny rulers during their playing career.
Mark Robins may be about to succeed downwards again as his Stoke City lead the table.
They’ll sack him if they get promoted.
A good point for Sheffield Wednesday at home to Blackburn tonight, leaving them just 28 points adrift of second from bottom Norwich City, who lost at home to Watford.
A second defeat to Ipswich Town in December for Frank Lampard’s league leading Coventry City.
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Wednesday will do well to not finish on minus points.
It’s never even happened on University Challenge.
West Bromwich Albion appointed Eric Ramsay as manager last week to replace the sacked Ryan Mason.
Ramsay’s previous managerial experience was two years managing Minnesota United.
Ramsay’s first game in charge was a 2-3 defeat to high flying Middlesbrough. Disappointing, but not a disaster, you’d think.
Tonight they lost 0-5 to third from bottom Norwich City.
I suspect nobody at West Bromwich Albion was keeping tabs on what happened at Celtic.
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Coventry overhauled by Norwich after taking a first half lead. Where would it rank in the proud tradition of Championship collapses if Frank doesn’t get them promoted from here?
Recently appointed former Rangers manager Phillippe Clement has the Canaries on the up and up.
Ipswich were beaten at the weekend.
Middlesbrough have had four wins on the bounce now under their new Swedish manager Kim Hellberg. That could have been you, Rob Edwards. You’d love to see 'Boro do it to honour the memory of Chris Rea.
Big Phil Brown’s Hull City the other form team at the moment.
I love filling my weekly one cent accumulators with Division 2 match bets.
Thrilling, relentless, unpredictable’: The Championship is the league of opportunity
Coventry players celebrate during their Championship win over Leicester this month Naomi Baker/Getty Images
Jan. 30, 2026Updated 4:32 pm GMT
Neil Warnock, with four promotions to the top flight on his managerial CV, admits this might not be a vintage year for quality teams in the Championship.
But this confirmed fan of the English game’s second tier insists the campaign is shaping up to be another classic for a competition where fans have long since learnt to expect the unexpected.
“I’ve never known it as close as this season,” the former Sheffield United and Cardiff City manager tells The Athletic.
“If I’m honest, I don’t think the quality is quite there, compared to the past few years. Last season was very strong at the top. But it’s as competitive as it has ever been.”
Warnock, the manager who has got the most teams promoted in English professional football history (eight), makes a good point about the 2024-25 campaign.
Champions Leeds United and runners-up Burnley bagged 100 points apiece, while Sheffield United became only the third team in Championship history to earn 90 points but fail to go up, after losing to fourth-placed Sunderland in the play-off final.
Leeds United’s players celebrate their last-gasp Championship title win in 2025Harry Trump/Getty Images
What really set last season apart, however, was the competitiveness of the division from top to bottom. With just four of the 46 games remaining, promotion or relegation was a possibility for every one of the 24 clubs.
A couple of those scenarios were tenuous — Sheffield Wednesday were 11 points clear of the relegation zone with 12 still up for grabs, and Norwich City had fallen 10 points behind Coventry City in the final play-off place — but it was a revealing statistic, especially when compared to last season’s Premier League. In the top flight, the title race was effectively a procession for Liverpool from January, while Ipswich Town became the third and final team to be relegated with four games remaining.
This prolonged excitement — Leeds only wrested the title away from Burnley’s grasp when Manor Solomon netted a stoppage-time winner on the final day at Plymouth Argyle — perhaps helps explain why supporters continue to flock to Championship matches.
Last season saw 12,170,350 fans file through the second tier’s turnstiles — slightly down on 2023-24, when 12,725,488 watched the 2,036 games, but otherwise the highest at this level since 1947-48.
“It’s a thrilling league, and fans love that,” adds Warnock, whose first promotion from what was then known as the Second Division came at the helm of Notts County in 1991, via the play-offs.
“You more or less know what is going to happen in the Premier League, whereas in the Championship, you haven’t got a bloody clue. There’s no chance of predicting a set of results one weekend. It just won’t happen. It’s why you often get teams going on a late run to go up. It can happen in the Championship because it’s so unpredictable.”
The Championship’s reputation as the league of opportunity is well-founded.
One success story — Crystal Palace going from fourth bottom at the midway stage of 2003-04 to clinching promotion in the May — even spawned a new entry in the Oxford English Dictionary.
“Bouncebackability” is how their manager Iain Dowie chose to describe his Palace side’s remarkable change of fortunes in the final season before the second tier was rebranded from Division One to the Championship.
A strong second half of the 2003-04 season helped Palace surge into the play-offs and up to the Premier LeagueGareth Copley/Getty Images
It’s a quality any team with serious aspirations of reaching the Premier League needs, as Coventry are finding out right now.
Not so long ago, Frank Lampard’s free-scoring leaders seemed to be coasting towards the title, only to recently stumble. Three defeats in six Championship outings have left the chasing pack smelling blood.
How Coventry respond to this adversity will be key, as Simon Grayson knows from his time as a player at this level. He was captain of the Leicester City side who made it third time lucky by beating Derby County to go up via the play-offs in 1994 after suffering heartbreak at Wembley when losing the two previous finals to Blackburn Rovers (1992) and Swindon Town (1993).
“The Championship has always been a demanding league,” says the 56-year-old, who has gone on to manage in the second tier with four different clubs. “And often it is how you handle those setbacks when they come along that matters the most.
“It’s such an honest league. You have to be ‘at it’ every game, or you pay the price. Being in the Championship means you’re so close to getting that ticket back to the Premier League, and that drives everyone on.”
Coventry’s wobble after looking so dominant in the opening months has allowed Middlesbrough to cut the deficit at the top to three points.
Middlesbrough, though, have had their own feast-and-famine existence. The club’s current four-game winning streak has come after another four-match run over Christmas and New Year that yielded just one point and no goals scored.
The teams right behind the top two are all in good form — Ipswich have seven wins from 10 league outings, Hull City seven in nine and Millwall four from six. A point separates those three clubs, while Wrexham, in sixth, are just two clear of Derby, who are in 11th place.
Derby are 11th in the 24-team table, but just two points off the play-off placesMichael Regan/Getty Images
Warnock can empathise with all those chasing the Premier League dream.
He says, “As a manager, it’s relentless. So mentally challenging. Same for the players, who also have the physical demands of playing Saturday-Tuesday-Saturday most weeks.
“Day in, day out, they face a challenge. It might be trying to stay in the team. Or, once playing, trying to win the next game. And then the one after that. Everyone gets uptight as a result, including the managers. There’s one thing after another in the Championship, and that’s why it gets to you.”
Little seems guaranteed, other than the rest of the season providing plenty of box-office entertainment.
Opta’s supercomputer runs 10,000 simulations of how things will unfold using all manner of variables, including the quality of a team’s performances, fixtures, historical results and even its own ‘power rankings’.
The data collector’s latest predicted table has Coventry emerging as champions and Middlesbrough finishing as runners-up. But this forecast is far from certain, with two-thirds of the 24 competing teams given a 4.9 per cent or higher chance of winning promotion. Contrast that with the Premier League, where even seventh-placed Fulham are given only a 3.94 per cent chance of qualifying for the Europa League by finishing just one place higher in sixth.
It’s a similar story with relegation.
Opta gives six teams in the Championship a 20 per cent chance or higher of going down, whereas the current bottom three in the Premier League are heavily tipped to drop, with West Ham United rated at an 81.76 per cent chance of being in the second division next season, Burnley 96.93 per cent and Wolverhampton Wanderers 99.93 per cent.
This unpredictability, together with the absence of the VAR system that continues to frustrate fans watching the Premier League, helps explain why some see the Championship as a more enjoyable alternative.
“There’s a sense of the journey to the Premier League being preferable to the actual arrival,” says former Leeds and Sunderland manager Grayson. “Certainly, among the fans I speak to.
“Of course, the Premier League is one of the best competitions in the world and has the best players. But the Championship is a different type of football, a bit more cut-throat. There are more mistakes and more chances to win games. The schedule gives it a unique feel, too, and it’s not always a case of money talking when it comes to league position.”
Money, of course, remains a thorny topic in the English Football League, which forms the three divisions below the top flight — in particular, the Premier League’s parachute payments, introduced in 2006-07 to help its relegated clubs cope with a sudden drop in income in the EFL. These are often seen as a means of distorting the competition.
Over the past decade, 15 of the 30 teams relegated from the Premier League have bounced straight back. This time around, however, things could be different, with only Ipswich among last season’s demoted trio holding much hope of earning instant promotion.
Ipswich are aiming to bounce back from last season’s Premier League relegationDavid Watts/Getty Images
The relative struggles faced by last year’s other two relegated sides Leicester and Southampton, plus Sheffield United as the only further second-tier team receiving parachute payments this season, offer an opportunity that might not be around next term. With 15 games to play, Wolves and Burnley are odds-on to return to the Championship. Then come West Ham, Nottingham Forest, Leeds, Palace and Tottenham Hotspur to complete the bottom seven.
“I look at the teams who might be coming down and they’ll be very strong,” says Warnock, whose eight promotions also include taking Sheffield United (2006), Queens Park Rangers (2011) and Cardiff (2018) up from the Championship.
“Whoever drops will have a very good chance of bouncing straight back. This is a big season in the Championship because of that. ‘Take it while you can’, that’s my message to these managers.
“You never get to choose. I hear people say, ‘Oh, we’ll do it next year’. That’s not how football works. And certainly not in the Championship.”
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Squeaky bum time for Fat Frank in the world’s most exciting league as Coventry lose 2-1 to low flying QPR at Loftus Road, conceding two quickfire second half goals to go from ahead to behind.
Middlesbrough beat Norwich 1-0 to join them on 58 points.
Phil Brown’s Hull City are FLYING with five wins in a row to go to 53 points.
That new West Brom manager they’ve got from MLS suffered another thumping at relegation stragglers Portsmouth.
MLS manager comes into a team which needs wins immediately, plays a rigid system with three at the back and wing backs, the players haven’t a clue, the players are unsuited to the SYSTEM, supporters are livid, supporters say the manager is clueless and needs to be sacked, supporters also say the players don’t care, the Director Of Football is getting it in the neck most of all, the supporters want him sacked too.
Minnesota United supporters are posting on the West Bromwich Albion Reddit telling them to stick with Ramsay, that it takes time for teams to adapt to his system.
I could have warned yis, lads.
Ramsay can go now as far as I’m concerned. The only worry is that Nestor will be the one recruiting his replacement so he’ll likely be just as bad.
Absolutely fucking disgusting. These players absolutely don’t give a shit don’t they? I want Ramsey to do well, I really really want to but at what point does it take for things to change? It’s evident that these players either can’t play the system or don’t want to play the system - or the system just doesn’t work.
Mepham and Taylor have been incredibly woeful. Illing-Junior just isn’t it. Heggebo is just stuck on his own because all we’re doing is lumping balls to nowhere for him.
I was a little optimistic after Derby, but that was just another replay of Norwich at home. This formation is not working, Ramsay just needs to bite the bullet and change back to what we’ve been playing all season. 3 at the back with wingbacks is not working. Imray brought in to help and allow this formation, but that side was nothing but exploited all game.
The Managerial appointment was, is, a huge mistake and his stubbornness or more likely, his lack of knowledge or experience, has taken away all of the good this team had in them and set them up to expose their weaknesses.
It’s shit football just on its own merits, we already know it’s tactically not going to work out in this league, but it’s particularly damaging to this group of players and our relegation is pretty much guaranteed now.
I haven’t seen Albion play this bad for 30 odd years.
On the Ramsey front. I would not be against sacking him now. The writing is on the wall. He seems unwilling to adapt and is in the habit of picking players that the average Albion fan would have told you was a bad decision beforehand. Nestor and Pearce can go with him.
Oh dear. 
Teddy Bears Ollie McBurnie and John Lundstrum are in their team but the manager is not Phil Brown unfortunately.
Coventry 0 Oxford United 0.
Fat Frank’s implosion continues against the second from bottom team.
15 games is a very long run in.
Coventry remain in the promotion places but Middlesbrough now have the theoretical advantage.
Behind those two we’ve a triple threat lurking of Ipswich and Millwall both of whom had big wins today, and Hull, who have had a bad week.
Ipswich look the real threat to Frank’s Sky Blues I think.
Four (4) points separates 6th place from 14th and two or three wins on the bounce could have any team in that bracket in that last play off place.
Birmingham going well recently but you couldn’t even write off Chris Wilder and Sheffield United down in 15th.
Leicester lose 3-4 after being 3-0 up. They could go down.
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