I must say I disagree with the pretty common suggestion I’ve seen that Saturday’s match with Lincoln is a League One title decider. After all, the biggest gap there can possibly be between the clubs after the game is if we win to go four points clear with a slightly better goal difference than the Imps.
A victory would put us on seventy five points and although I note that some bookies have stopped taking bets on finishing in the top two, there is no way that a side will be going up automatically with that number of points.
Okay, I accept that it is very, very unlikely to happen, but it’s not impossible for a feeling that, having beaten your biggest challengers, the job in hand has been done when, in truth, it hasn’t. In fact, it’s nowhere near done. In such circumstances, setbacks would inevitably follow and, having lost that intensity which you need to mount a successful promotion challenge, it would become very hard to get it back.
The same applies even more so to Lincoln who would go a couple of points clear with that slightly better goal difference if they were to win, but is that really an insurmountable gap for us when there are still thirty three points left to play for?
As for what will happen, what I would say is that Saturday’s four goal win means that we’re currently averaging exactly two goals scored per league game and I can’t help thinking that, if we are to win, we need to at least maintain that average.
WhoScored,com’s stats show that we are, by some distance, bottom of the League One table for winning aerial challenges (Lincoln are fourth best) and although our goals conceded from set pieces figure is better than I expected (we’re eleventh lowest), Lincoln are top of the scoring charts from free kicks, corners and throw ins.
The thing is, I’m haunted by how easy Lincoln’s winning goal in the first meeting between the teams looked and so I can’t see us being able to keep a clean sheet on Saturday – especially when we’re likely to be missing Yousef Salech’s aerial ability in defending near post corners again.
The funny thing is that although a draw is the result the chasing pack will probably most want, I wouldn’t be surprised at all if City and Lincoln both took a point each today if it were offered to them. Although only fourteen matches out of the sixty eight the two teams have played between them have finished all square, I wouldn’t be that shocked if it finished level on the weekend.
On to the quiz with it’s seven questions which I’ll publish the answers to on Sunday.
60s. Lincoln, a little like Cardiff, are a side that, in my experience, have played a lot of long ball football, so, being mischievous, I’ll suggest that this player’s surname was quite appropriate! Although he only played league football for Lincoln, and then it was less than a hundred times, his Wikipedia page is an interesting read.
While on a youth contract with the club representing his birthplace, he played in the First Leg of the Youth Cup Final against the famed Busby Babes which was lost 7-1. Injury ruled him out of the return game and so he was never presented with a loser’s medal until he wrote to the FA some fifty six years later because he thought it would be “something nice to show his grandchildren” and they agreed to his request. While at this club, he was also selected as a guinea pig for an experiment which never got off the ground. It was during the early days of floodlit matches and, as a winger, he was selected to wear a fluorescent shirt because it was figured he would be close to the touchline (I would have thought it would be better to have someone who played through the middle of the pitch wearing it!).
His senior career began with a team which although it is very close to Lincoln in one sense, they very rarely, if ever, came up against in league football. Freed without playing a game, he then joined Lincoln where goals came at a decent rate for him in his eighty or so appearances. His one encounter with City did not go well and upon his release by Lincoln in 1964, he dropped into non league football to represent whites who were close to a border. One other unusual feature was that he only ever played semi professional football for Lincoln as he kept his “day job” as a draughtsman, can you name him?
70s. Another player with a surname that is unique in the game since I became a follower of it in the sixties, this full back began his career playing for a team from the city he was born in during this decade, but it was in the 80s that he represented Lincoln. His first club was used to much grander surroundings, but his one league appearance for them came in a losing cause at Saltergate, Chesterfield. Released at the age of nineteen, he dropped into non league football to represent a team of journeymen, and women, which would go on to experience league football in the future and his form was impressive enough for him to be offered a route back into the full time game with a team which won one of the more famous FA Cup Finals. Playing under a World Cup winner for a while, he did well enough for this club to earn a move to Lincoln for a modest fee in 1982 and he was a regular in the team which probably came closest to regaining Lincoln’s place in the top two divisions until the current side. Moving on six years later, he joined a nearby non league threesome which had briefly played league football a long, long time earlier. Who is he?
80s. Puppet show villain at the back for Lincoln for a short while during this decade – he would be given a testimonial game by his parent club a year later.
90s. Raving goon dressed initially in amber for the Tigers. (5,6)
00s. Simple sewer now found in spa town.
10s. Evangelist with a cataract?
20s. Award a headache?
