Time for City to deliver

The behemoth of relegation has lurched in the shadows for much of Lincoln City’s campaign, but now the ugly beast has emerged roaring into the sunlight and is seriously threatening to devour the Imps unless they can find salvation in the final 90 minutes left of the season.

Manager Steve Tilson’s recurring mantra of ‘we must reach 50 points’ has fallen on the deaf ears of his players since early Spring and an abysmal return of two points from a possible 30 has left the club fearing the nightmare scenario of a return visit to the upper echelon of the non-league pyramid, namely the Blue Square Premier, with their 24-year run in the Football League in serious jeopardy.

Those who can remember the 1986/87 season do not want a repeat showing, but the men in red and white stripes seem determined to put the City faithful through the ringer again, seemingly apathetic to the plight of the paying throngs on the terraces.

But for a five-game winning sequence in January/February – totally out of character to what has gone on for the rest of the campaign – City would already be down. Since that victory run was brought to a crashing halt due to a 5-1 home humbling at the hands of Shrewsbury, Lincoln have recorded a pitiful three victories in 18 outings, conceding on average nearly two goals a game, scoring less than one a match.

Easter Monday’s pathetic second-half performance against fellow strugglers Cheltenham, a seventh reverse in nine, encapsulated all that is rotten among the playing staff at Lincoln City who, the majority at least, quite clearly don’t give a monkey’s about the direction the club are headed, with the notable exceptions of Paul Green, Ashley Grimes, Luke Howell and Danny Hone. A modicum of improvement was shown at Oxford on Saturday, but after going a goal up after only five minutes and looking comfortable for about an hour, the wheels fell off again and to pour salt onto the wounds, Danny Hone’s late faux pa has now robbed City off a vital component of their defence for Saturday’s must-win clash with Aldershot.

The prognosis is clear – a win will keep Lincoln City in the promised land, so will a draw and even a defeat should Barnet not beat Port Vale at Underhill. Matching what the Bees do will be good enough. But should Giuliano Grazioli’s men take all three points and City don’t, then it is into the nether regions of non league football where the Imps must take their battered pride and souls.

The seeds of this terrible denoument were sown when the unproven and unpopular Chris Sutton was handed the reins by a star-struck City board in the summer of September 2009, keen to bring a big name to the club. Yes, he managed to keep Lincoln in the Football League that season, thanks to making some calls to his Premier League mates who provided City with some loan gems, but with a full pre-season under his belt a year later, no progression was forthcoming and the writing was on the wall when he ‘persuaded’ Drewe Broughton to sign on the dotted line at Sincil Bank, with the promise of great riches a tempting prospect for the journeyman who could not believe his luck about the offer on the table.

Any club that not only signs a striker of that calibre but also pays him the earth is quickly dispatched into the category labelled ‘desperate’ and to add insult to injury he also brought in another non-scoring striker, namely Delroy Facey, but at least he earned his corn at the club before injury put paid to his season. And I have not even mentioned the £1m-rated striker Ben Hutchinson, who is on a run of 23 games without a goal and who takes home a salary most of the county’s population could only dream about.

Thankfully for City and to the delight of the faithful, Sutton washed his hands of the whole affair exactly a year after he arrived, saving the club from yet another hefty pay-off, despite a certain (and deluded?) Imps chairman begging him to prolong his stay at the club. His year in charge had clearly been a chore for the man from Norfolk, who could not get to grips with a bunch of players (or supporters come to that) who clearly were not fit to lace his own boots.

And so enter Tilson, a popular choice amongst the City brethren, along with his partner-in-crime Paul Brush, a pair feted amongst the lower League fraternity. They nearly steered the club to mid-table following a run of five straight wins and thanks mainly to the goals of the prolific Grimes, but stagnation was quick to follow, with the side lurching from one defeat to the next, with the golden ’50-point mark’ proving so elusive.

The situation has not been helped by Tilson’s bizarre snub of the elder elements within the squad, when he himself has been crying out for experienced players, with the likes of Green (until recently), Jamie Clapham and Joe Anyon constantly being snubbed when they are just the sort of players a side with lack of belief needs. And the release of Scott Kerr now looks an even bigger mistake. He was not everyone’s cup of tea, but the former skipper was one to man the battlements in times of crisis.

Saturday’s defeat of Oxford was Tilson’s 18th reverse in 36 matches in charge, a statistic that is on a par with the short-lived reign of Allan Clarke, but one which is even worse than George Kerr, the man who put City on the road to the Conference back in ’87. Okay, so you could argue he is operating on a shoestring budget and with a squad that he mainly did not assemble. But 36 games should have been enough for him to sort out the mess and overcome the threat of relegation, rather than relying on a beverage at the last-chance this Saturday.

Now the question is: Can he get an under-performing set of players ready for one last hurrah at the weekend, squeeze every ounce of effort from their pores and turn in a performance to finally make the fans proud? Or will the 90 minutes, in front of what should be a packed Sincil Bank, be the final nail in the coffin of what has been a horrendous 2010/11 season?

We live in hope, we really do. Now t’is the time for the men in red and white to deliver…