A rare and well deserved home win for the Imps!

There was little to fault from an extremely hard working performance, we rode our luck a few times with some superb saves from Joe Anyon, but overall it was hard to disagree that the Imps were the more superior side.

It took only seven minutes for a superb deep cross from captain Nutter to fall perfectly onto the head of Christophe, who started in place of the suspended Power, his bullet of a header gave no chance for Southport ‘keeper McMillan. The rest of the first half then seemed to pass by without too much incident or football played on the grass, Smith could have made it two but put his close header just over the bar.

Fresh from scoring two goals against Southport, Pacquette looked like a man with confidence, he made a string of good runs which always looked to trouble the opposing defenders. the one negative of the first half was an injury to top scorer Sam Smith, who was caught late. Whilst it hasn’t been confirmed there are fears that he may miss the rest of the season with a fracture.

The second half started with Lloyd replacing the injured Smith, and what a half it was from the young forward, he displayed something that us fans have been crying out for, work rate, effort, determination and eagerness to make something happen. If he can translate his 45 minute outing into a full 90 minute show, then we may have found our diamond in the rough.

The second, winning, goal came in a spell of excellent attacking play from Lincoln. Pacquette picked up the ball on the edge of the area with only one thing in his mind, to turn and unleash a rocket on the goal, and he did exactly that, a fantastic strike, making it three goals in two games for the new recruit.

Anyon made a few excellent saves later on in the half, but Southport never really looked like getting behind the Imps defence, most of their efforts coming from range. And this leads to a reason why we never looked troubled, former Captain Josh Gowling, who put in a performance to rival any we have seen from a defender at Sincil Bank in recent years. He read the game superbly, always first to meet the ball and won virtually everything in the air.

Gowling was rightly named the man of the match, lets hope, like the team, that this is the start of a run of good performances. After a tricky patch in his reign at the Imps, last night showed that maybe Holdsworth does has a plan to get the team climbing up the table. we can’t get ahead of ourselves though, this time last year we were embarking on a five game winning streak…….we all know how that turned out!

Slowly but surely the signs of improvement are there, next up is an away trip to financially crippled Kettering, come on Lincoln, lets add another three points to the league table.