Sunday 26th July 2026 ko 15:00

United Counties League Premier South

COVENTRY SPHINX 1 (Parker 64)

DESBOROUGH TOWN 2 (Blaikie 2 Bradshaw 18)

Att 422

Entry £8

Programme £2

In a hop that was, for me, made up entirely of revisits, a trip back Coventry Sphinx was intriguing. For those not in the know the club was formed in 1946 as the works team of Hawker Siddley which immediately made me think back to the Hawker YMCA ground in Kingston-on-Thames I’d visited a week or two earlier. The firm, now swallowed up by Rolls Royce made aircraft, and luxury cars, with one the Sphinx giving the football club an interesting name change in 1993 with the Coventry prefix being added in 1995.

I remember visiting Sphinx Drive back in November 2006, and little wonder I didn’t recognise the place 20 years later. I remembered two things; one was passing time with Andrew Stidder’s dad, the lad was on loan here from Banbury United, and just how open the place was. It was so obviously a former works ground with cricket, even a ballroom in the huge clubhouse!

These day the ground feels more enclosed with the cricket pitch now the 2nd XI pitch but the 3rd pitch is gone- I visited there in 2015 with the late Graeme Askham- (he of the Chinese takeaway menu collection) with the encroachment of housing like so many places, taking care of the spare land.

The ground is now known as the  Cameron Slater Arena being named after a young man who died in 2024 aged 23 after suffering a cardiac arrest, the idea to give publicity to Cardiac Risk in the Young- Cry for short. Here’s a link to the charity– all the best to them, and to Cameron’s family and friends.

The club has spent the vast majority of its existance in the Midland Combination (now Midland League) but did spend 3 seasons in the Northern Premier League being relegated into the UCL for this season.

I do worry about clubs with recent stints at a higher level as groundhop hosts as they tend to either show a lack of interest or simply do what they normally do, with a slight upscaling in catering. There was no such lack of ambition here, and once the kitchen got into their stride the masses got fed and the food was excellent too!

The game at times was a tough watch; two sides probably too well matched, and both well versed in the dark arts. Sphinx lost purely because it took them 20 minutes to get going, and by that time they were two-nil down!