Some positive news came about this week for Coventry City fans with the return of Richard Shaw to the club as Andy Thorn’s assistant manager.

Richard Shaw is considered by many as a bit of a club legend after making over 350 appearances for Coventry City. He arrived at Coventry in 1995 from Crystal Palace for £1million and remained a constant in the heart of Coventry’s defence for the following ten seasons.

Throughout his time at Coventry he was loved by both the fans and his teammates and he managed to win both the Player of the Year award as well as the Players Player of the Year award. His time at the club came to an end in 2006 after a decade here and a testimonial match was arranged against Celtic in which the SkyBlues came out 3-1 winners and made for a great send off for him.

He was then released by the club and joined Millwall where for the third time in his career went on to win the Player of the Year award.

He spent a couple of seasons playing for Millwall in which he spent a short period as caretaker manager. He eventually retired at the end of the 2007-08 season and took up a role as a coach at the club. He recently left this position at Millwall and has been quickly appointed as Andy Thorn’s Assistant for the upcoming season.

Over the past few weeks Coventry fans have had to watch a continuous stream of players and backroom staff leave the club, so it is a nice feeling to finally see someone on the footballing side of things being brought into the club. Richard Shaw is a young coach and hopefully has some exciting ideas which can help the team in the upcoming season. He clearly knows the game itself after a long playing career and hopefully he can pass some of his knowledge and skills on to the current playing squad.

The only negative side to this appointment is he again is going to be very defensively minded with him being an ex defender himself. This seems to be a bit of a theme for Coventry as a club with many ex-managers and coaches coming from a defensive background in the game.

Some attacking knowledge could be of real help to the squad as a lack of goals has been an issue for a long time for Coventry City. He is a leader though and will be passionate about the club and for that reason I am sure he will do everything he can to help the club to be successful again.

In order for this to happen though we clearly do need some sort of financial backing from the owners. It has been reported that Barnsley have agreed a fee with Manchester United for Oliver Norwood. Norwood is a player who had a great spell at Coventry in the last few months of last season and is someone who Thorn would love to have at his disposal again.

We have reportedly had a bid rejected for Norwood with reports suggesting that we are some way off United’s valuation of the player. The fee agreed with Barnsley is supposed to be in the region of £400,000 so I would suggest that we offered peanuts for him.

Anyone can see that this is an absolute bargain price for a player of his quality. SISU need to step up now and show their intent because Norwood would not only be a great signing on the pitch he would be a fantastic investment opportunity as his value is only going to rise in the future.

There is of course every chance that even if we did come up with the money to buy him that he would choose to go and play in the Championship rather than league one and this would be totally understandable. However we need to give ourselves a chance by coming up with that money and showing our intent that we want him to come and join us.

Most if not all fans including myself would suggest that this signing is however extremely unlikely but we as fans have to keep hoping. Signing Norwood would be a huge step in the right direction for the club both in terms of improving the playing squad for the new season and making a sound investment

PUSB!!

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