Everything points to Coventry home win

If Sheffield United were due to play at the Wheel tappers and Shunters Social Club today, the committee would have booked a stand-by comic turn just in case they failed to turn up.

Rarely can a club have reached the FA Cup quarter-finals in such turmoil. This week the manager has resigned in protest at the enforced selling of half the team, the chairman has followed suit because the fans turned against him, and now the old manager might just get his old job back. Add to that 13 players either injured or cup-tied and about the best they can hope for against Coventry City is that the shirts come back from the laundry.

There have not been many occasions when you would place your shirt on a Coventry home win, except if they needed to escape relegation on the last day of the season. Today, though, the thought could not be more tempting. Gordon Strachan's side have waltzed to seven successive wins, a club record, there is no more fashionable striking partnership than Dion Dublin and Darren Huckerby, and no one has even thought of relegation for at least a month. Well, not much anyway.

As Strachan says: "We have broken records and hoodoos. People talk about golf matches and nights out improving team spirit but it's got nothing to do with that. It's all about winning."

At such times a calming influence is called for, an old head who can warn his Coventry teammates that in an FA Cup quarterfinal there is no such thing as a formality.

Roland Nilsson, their Swedish full-back who is the epitome of composure, needs no second bidding. "Sheffield's past week hasn't exactly been ideal," he reflected, "but in the same circumstances we would be putting the disruption out of our minds and trying to get on with the job."

Nilsson knows how situations can change in an instant. At a time when many Scandinavians have settled in English football, Nilsson was the international who was forced to go back. For three seasons, he suppressed his professional ambitions for the sake of his family life.

That he is back in the Premiership, at 34, two matches away from a fourth Wembley final, owes everything to the sentiments of his two young children.

Had Theresa, 11, and Matthew, six, blanched at the thought of returning to England, then he says he would still have been playing part-time for Helsingborg in the Swedish First Division and supplementing his income by selling insurance.

Things changed again last summer with a telephone call from his former manager at Sheffield Wednesday Ron Atkinson, purportedly ringing for advice on other Swedish players. Atkinson had regarded his signing of Nilsson for Sheffield Wednesday - £475,000 from Gothenburg - as the best-value deal of his life. Seven years on, with his loyalties then resting with Coventry, he sensed the chance to do it all over again.

"We joked about him offering me another contract and, a week later, he rang back and we talked about it seriously. The decision was left to the children. If they had said `no' then I wouldn't have been here today. Now I'll keep going as long as my fitness is good."

It was with Wednesday that Nilsson experienced three Wembley finals. The League Cup final victory over Manchester United seven years ago, thanks to John Sheridan's goal, remains his proudest moment. Two years later, in 1993, Nilsson was back at the Twin Towers in the finals of both the League Cup and FA Cup but there was to be no repeat of his earlier success, Arsenal twice getting the better of Wednesday.

If it was Atkinson's persuasive powers that initially led Nilsson to join Coventry, he has been equally impressed by Strachan's managerial acumen. "I'm surprised how quickly Gordon has grasped the demands of the job. Normally, it can take four or five years, but his enthusiasm rubs off on us all."

To observe a Coventry side in such rude health is to salute a change of role for a club typecast for too long. Who knows how long it might last. But while it does, the words of their midfield player Paul Telfer after their recent win at Crystal Palace ring true: "Seven successive wins! Last season we had a run of five or six defeats and we said, please God, give us a result. It's all a bit different now." Sheffield United can only trust that their lot can change so quickly.