Coventry City’s 2023/24 Championship campaign will be remembered for many things, with Sunday’s ‘oh so close’ FA Cup semi-final at Wembley living long in the memory of the fans.

The agonising outcome after the Sky Blues had gone within a whisker of what many agree would have been the greatest comeback in the history of the competition perhaps symbolises Mark Robins’ nearly men over the last thrilling 12 months at the club.

City suffered the same fate last May when they went out in the play-off final in another cruel penalty shootout against Luton Town that denied them a return to the Premier League. This season a similar late promotion push for a top six finish appears to have fallen short.

But supporters can rest assured that their club continues to make progress and is edging ever closer to the taste of tangible success. Last season’s play-off climax signalled to the football world that Coventry City are back on the up, ready to fight to rejoin the country’s elite.

On the back of that City managed to attract another level in terms of the quality of players willing and wanting to come to sign on at the CBS Arena – players who have grown throughout the season to take the Sky Blues to the forefront of people’s minds once more.

A wider footballing audience will have seen the heroic comeback at Wolves in the quarter-finals and then witnessed them very nearly humiliate Manchester United at the national stadium. And there will now be players out there who will be desperate to be part of that.

Looking beyond the post-match disappointment of Sunday’s game, Robins looked to the positive effect his players’ performance will have in the coming months when the summer transfer window will provide an opportunity for the manager to further strengthen and enhance his exciting squad.

“It’s brilliant for the club because when you are looking to kick on and recruit, hopefully that comes to the fore,” he said. “The club has been in the doldrums for so long and we’re certainly out of that period and we have to keep moving it forwards, which is why we won’t feel sorry for ourselves. We won’t allow that to happen.

“We’ll just move on and move past it and try to build into an exciting end to this season and then go again next season. Because we have to recruit again and look what we can do from this point onwards, and have a really good look at that and see where we can go.”

One of the reasons City have come up short in the league is, without doubt, trying to get through such a busy season with such a small squad – losing key players like Ben Sheaf for several weeks; the attacking thrust of Tatsuhiro Sakamoto for the last three months of the campaign; the effervescent energy of Jamie Allen and inability to add attacking reinforcements in January as Ephron Mason-Clark was signed on the condition that he was immediately loaned back to Peterborough.

And that’s clearly another area Robins is determined to address this summer in order to build and prepare for a more sustainable promotion push next season.

“We have got a small squad, haven’t got 150 players to choose from,” he said, “so we have an Academy that has a finite amount of players here. We’ve brought Josh Eccles through. Kai Andrews is an 18-year-old who was on the bench at Wembley and only had a couple of cameos, but we have a really tight group.

“Tatsu Sakamoto hurt his back in February and has been out since, Jamie Allen was sat on the bench but has only trained twice since fracturing his cheekbone in one of the earlier rounds of the competition, and it affects and hurts us. So we have got to try to add that depth a little bit, and add a bit more quality to be able to cope with things a little bit better in the future.”

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