The new chairman of Lincoln City will be announced today, the Stacey West understands.
The Echo reported yesterday it would be the next ’24-48′ hours, but an announcement over who will succeed Bob Dorrian as Imps supremo is now expected to come before the end of play today.
Liam Scully admitted in the Echo article that it will simply be ‘business as usual’ and the only difference will be who sits in which seat, but for Imps fans I think it is far more than that.
A chairman of a club ushers in an ‘era’ so to speak. We all remember John Reames era, Rob Bradley’s era and so on, even though there’s no significant change to structure, the new chairman will be at the head of a new era. Bob’s era saw a complete collapse and rebuild, a battle against adversity and ultimately success against all odds, but the new man is taking over a club in good shape and pointing in the right direction.
The red-hot favourite has to be Clive Nates. Clive has been present throughout the upturn, joining the club in December 2015, and has recently been instrumental in attracting further investment and knowledge into the club. He’s an approachable man who is more often seen in the stands amongst fans than in the directors box. The feeling I get from Clive is he works hard not just to get the business side right, but also to understand the fans. He wants to see the games with us, he wants to know how we feel, he wants to understand us.
Bob Dorrian was a fan and to a degree, he already got it, but Clive came in relatively cold in 2015. However, he would be a very popular choice as his name does seem to be synonymous with our upturn in fortunes, as well as being one of the men helping to attract Danny and Nicky to the club.
My own personal outside favourite would be Roger Bates, perhaps for personal reasons as I’ve worked with Roger raising money for the Future Imps Fund. Clive may not want to oversee things from South Africa and may want someone with boots on the ground in the UK. Roger has been around the club as long as I can remember, first as creator and editor of Deranged Ferret and recently as the director in charge of looking after the youth academy. I’m sure the board would have voted for Clive, but if not then I’d like to think of Roger as a viable and worthy alternative.
Whoever it is, we don’t expect much to change. The running of the club has seemed to be very much a collaborative recently without a single person wielding too much power and sway, so hopefully this change in the board room is simply administration and things on the pitch can continue to progress as normal.
Surely Lincoln would be the first club to have two of their last three chairmen who have been editors of fanzines? Remember buying fanzines off Roger way back when!