Somehow the suggestion that the traditionally west London club Wasps were about to up sticks from its Acton training base – and home tenure at Wycombe – to move to Coventry had seemed a little bit too bizarre to be true.

Yet it all became scarily official on Tuesday when Coventry City Council approved the club’s £20m purchase of the company that owns the Ricoh Arena on the outskirts of the city.

If you think there are shades of Wimbledon’s annexation to Milton Keynes in 2002, you are dead right.

Down to the extent that, apparently, approval by Premiership Rugby is just going to be a case of rubberstamping the deal early next week.

London Welsh’s move to Oxford helped pave the way and it seems this will go through on the nod.

The club’s heritage of players from the west London region count for nothing. The fans who have already been forced to travel 30 miles from their traditional Sudbury base for the past 12 years, clearly count for even less.

As for the future of Coventry rugby club, with a famous past of their own, it’s worth remembering that a club called MK City folded as a result of Pete Winkelman’s club.

Wasps got a 21,000 crowd for a Heineken Cup match with Munster in Coventry back in 2007, but playing week-in, week-out at a 32,000 stadium in the Midlands is likely to be surreal.

Having been to a Midlands derby at the Ricoh with the flattest of atmospheres because the ground was too big for Coventry City, it’s hard to imagine where Wasps are expecting these supporters to come from.

Once fans are mobilised against the move as Wimbledon fans were, the chances of them keeping many of their existing fans are remote.

Football, and rugby clubs, are nothing without their fans and their heritage.

And it was appropriate on the day Wasps’ move to Coventry appears to have been sealed that the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy threw up the most heartwarming of results: the Fake Dons 2 the Real Dons 3.