Sky Blues fansite relaunched after 19-year hiatus

A fan website for Coventry City FC which made its last post almost 20 years ago has been re-launched after the club's promotion to the Premier League.

Jonathan Barton founded Letsallsingtogether.com, or LAST, in 1996, with the first post a report on Coventry's 1-1 draw with Southampton in October that year.

The final LAST post was in 2007 after the club went into administration and was taken over by the hedge fund SISU.

"When we got promoted [to the Premier League], I wrote about my late auntie and uncle who used to take me to the football and put it on there. I got such a nice response from people that I thought 'maybe now is the right time to bring it back'," Barton said.

Even though he closed the site, Barton retained the domain name and after publishing his promotion piece, the reaction he received from fans who used to read it for the latest gossip and rumour about the Sky Blues, encouraged him to re-start it.

He re-built the site and began posting 10 days ago and said it had been viewed 10,000 times.

Barton also told BBC CWR that the current generation of fans who make podcasts about the club had been in touch to say if it had not been for LAST, they would not be doing what they were doing.

"There's a podcast called the Nii Lampety Show [Lampety was a Ghanaian who played 11 games for Coventry in the 1995-96 season and became a cult figure] and they posted on their X account, that if it wasn't for LAST, the Nii Lampety Show wouldn't exist.

"They were students at the school I used to work at and knew I did LAST, but they never had the courage to knock on my door and say 'hello'."

The success of the original website meant that it was the first to reveal that Gary McAllister had been appointed Coventry City manager in 2002.

"It was about two or three days before the newspapers had it. It was a big scoop," said Barton, who applied for the job himself.

"I got a letter back from the club on headed paper saying 'thank you for your interest in the first-team manager's job. You may well be aware that we have appointed Gary McAllister to the position. Thank you for your interest'."

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