Well I have been to prettier places, but figure any city that can spawn The Specials can’t be all that bad.

But Coventry, who next season will be elevated to professional rugby league's Championship 1, has plenty to offer the 13-man code.

The Bears have already been showing a taste of that in the Conference – but as a professional club, being able to attract and pay players will open even more doors.

Admittedly most people look at Coventry and think Lady Godiva, the Blitz and Jimmy Hill - but the city has a something of a rugby pedigree, albeit predominantly in the other code.

As a city it is football mad - maybe mad is the operative word given the Sky Blues have spent the last year playing 35 miles away in Northampton due to a dispute with the owners of the palatial 32,000 seat Ricoh Arena – but I’ll leave that issue alone.

But that belt of the country from south to east Midlands is ripe for development.

I realise a lot of people in the heartlands are quick to write off the latest new expansion project.

But this strategy has got to be the most sensible way of developing our game and ensuring that it grows, not shrinks.

It won't be the first time the city has had a dalliance with league - Coventry had a short spell in the Northern Union at the start of the 1910-11 season.

That didn’t last long and they were gone and playing rugby union again by 1913.

That doesn’t end the city’s link with league. In the early seventies Meriden-born Coventry hooker John Gray turned professional with Wigan and went on to play eight times for Great Britain, touring with the Lions in 1974 and playing for England in the 1975 World Championships.

There he caught the eye of the North Sydney Bears and went Down Under to play in the Premiership. A further spell at Manly followed before returning to the Bears.

The former Woodlands Comprehensive School pupil left a lasting impression – he made the bench in Bears’ team of the century.

He wasn’t the only Midlander making an impression in the 70s – nearby Moseley provided flying Superstar Keith Fielding and prop Mike Coulman for the then big-spending Salford.

I spent 12 years living to the north of Coventry in Birmingham – and I did cover sport in both cities.

What was really noticeable covering rugby union for the MetroNews and then the Birmingham Mail was how much like a rugby league crowd the gate at Coventry’s Coundon Road was.

There were no stuffy attitudes – how could there be in an area called Spon End but crowds that really got into their rugby especially when they played Moseley.

It was similar at Bedford – and the places struck me as areas that would take to rugby league like a shot.

I spent a bit of time in Coventry – and yes you can see where the lyrics to Concrete Jungle come from as soon as you start walking away from the station.

As bizarre aside one of my mates, who was a DJ, once played a club there. Alas the clubbers didn't like his set and because that spoilt their precious Saturday night a gang of them waited for him outside and smashed his records.

In so many ways Cov is just like Leeds, Bradford, Hull and Salford – and industrial city crying out for successful sport - football, ice hockey, rugby union - and now rugby league

There has, in the past, been a lot of bad attitudes, prejudice and outright bigotry towards league by some in the media and in the old guard union hierarchy. But that is not everywhere and we have to recognise and embrace good opportunities when we see them.

I honestly believe that rugby league can make slow, but steady progress in Coventry and get a real foothold in the middle of England.