The harsh truth is that Lincoln City did not deserve to be in the top seven in 2005/06, not really.
This was Keith‘s final season as Imps boss, and having lost players like Gain, Butcher, Taylor-Fletcher and Yeo, a rebuild had been necessary. That rebuild included players such as Gary Birch, Marvin Robinson, Colin Cryan and Nat Brown. They weren’t bad players, but play-off quality? Probably not.
That was certainly the feeling in the first 25 matches in the league and cup: City won just five, four in the league. With 20 games played, we were sitting 15th in the table, just five points outside the bottom two. Oddly, we were also only seven points outside the top seven in what as a tight division.
Then we found the right gear, and between December 3 and March 25 we lost just two matches. That included a run of 12 league matches undefeated, including a double over Barnet, 4-1 and 3-2, culminating in the 5-0 thrashing of Grimsby Town. Oh, how we laughed. That win took us to seventh and momentum was with us. Actually, it wasn’t. We lost the next two, then drew two, but still we couldn’t seem to throw away the play-off spot. Peterborough were imploding on Big Ron Manager and handing the last spot to us. An impressive 3-0 win at fellow promotion hunters Wycombe was perhaps the result of the season and it went some way to set up a two-legged play-off clash with Grimsby, the first leg of which would be at Sincil Bank on May 13.
How fitting it seemed, Keith’s final games as Lincoln manager would be against Grimsby Town in the play-offs. Arguably, his finest hour had been 2002/03 when near rivals Scunthorpe were defeated, could he repeat that feat and send us to the Millennium Stadium, where either Wycombe or Cheltenham would await? 8007 fans turned up to see if we could get a decent start in the first leg.
City lined up Marriott, McAuley, Morgan, McCombe, Hughes, Beevers, Kerr, Brown, Robinson, Forrester, Green. Subs were Frecklington, Yeo, Birch, Mayo and Cryan. It’s not a bad Imps side, and in terms of strikers, Marvin Robinson, Jamie Forrester, Francis Green, Simon Yeo and Gary Birch was quite a collection. Between them, they had 28 goals, although five of those came from Forrester’s nine outings, and another five from yeo’s 11 since his return. Green had struggled with three from 23 starts, whilst Birch and Robinson had 69 combined appearances and just 15 goals to share.
As for Grimsby, they had a couple of former Imps in their ranks, as you’d expect. Ben Futcher and Ciaran Toner had played under Keith at one point or another, whilst Junior Mendes also started and would be a part of the squad that lost 2-1 at Bristol Rovers a year later. Curtis Woodhouse would also go on to spend time as David Holdsworth’s assistant in 2013, whilst Gary Croft would turn up at the Bank for the tail end of John schofield’s time as manager.
City certainly played well in Keith’s last game at the Bank as boss, and twice had the ball in the net only for it to be ruled out, once for offside and once for a foul. Jamie McCombe appeared to have opened the scoring from a corner, only to be penalised for an alleged push on their Grimsby defender by Lee Mason. Not long after, Francis Green turned his defender inside out and cross for Forrester, who scuffed the ball to Robinson. He slammed it home, and once again the whistle went, this time for offside. Both can be found on YouTube and I’m not sure about the foul, but it was given, so there isn’t much you can do.
That all came before the opening goal on 22 minutes. Curtis Woodhouse picked up a ball in the left channel and from the corner of the six-yard box, drilled a ball across for Gary Jones to slide home.
The Imps kept pressing, a Jeff Hughes free-kick brought a great save from keeper Steve Mildenhall, whilst a clearance off the line allowed Lee Beevers to drive at goal, only for the keeper to tip over. The Imps really could have got something from the game, but saw the Mariners hit the bar in the second half. In the dying embers of the game, Tom Newey cleared a Nat Brown header off the line, only for Kerr’s awkward effort from an acute angle to then hit the bar. That was pretty much the last action, with the Imps going down 1-0.
“I was quite pleased with our performance. We had a lot of the all and had one or two chances and it has not been our day,” Keith said after the match. “We had the better chances all game, we were on top and they were hanging on. We hit the bar and post and they had one effort. We should have done much better. It will be a difficult game going there one down. But we can afford to go and attack and that is what we will do. They will be delighted coming away with a 1-0 win but we put them under pressure all game.”
In truth, whilst it was a defeat for Keith in his final game at the Bank, it was a decent performance against a side that finished 12 points ahead of us in the league. Had the opener from McCombe stood, City could well have pressed on and got a result, leaving Grimsby with it all to do. Still, it didn’t and it was the Mariners with the advantage in the second leg, which took place three days later.
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