It took Ellis Simms’ first season as a Coventry City player to really catch fire, but when it did the former Evertonian couldn’t stop scoring. The striker’s first campaign in sky blue involved a nine-game wait to break his duck, with a brace in a win at Queens Park Rangers at the end of September last year.
That didn’t prompt a purple patch, however; indeed the opposite, as Simms ‘ dry period extended by another 15 games without any more strikes to show for his hard work from game to game. After Christmas, though, the forward really came to the fore. There were the hat-tricks against Maidstone and Rotherham, the braces against Huddersfield and Wolves.
To end your first season at the club with 19 goals, having scored 17 of them after Christmas, is some going. Netting within two games of the new season beginning – and, poetically, within two minutes of being introduced at Bristol City in the EFL Cup on Tuesday night – will hopefully prove to be a pointer of what is to come.
Simms hasn’t had to wait anything like the length of time he did last year to get off the mark, and the manner in which he took this winning goal at Ashton Gate, having been played in by Kasey Palmer, taking the ball in his stride, holding off the last man and powerfully placing the ball with great authority in the far corner, suggests Simms still has that sharpness in front of goal.
“Ellis worked hard,” boss Mark Robins said. “There was a spark when he came on, the intensity lifted for a little while. The five changes caught them on the hop, you can’t adjust. It gave us a little bit of an edge, but the fact that we got into a position where Ellis was able to take the chance and tuck it away was great. He finished it brilliantly. We had other chances after that to finish the game, but it was disappointing because we didn’t pick the right pass.
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