I know this one might be a bit odd, but I had multiple reasons for making Udo Onwere my favourite player during his spell with the Imps.
Like Gary Lund, I didn’t actually get to see Udo play an awful lot for the club. He arrived in the summer of 1994 but was only on trial at first. I was just finishing my fourth year at school, heading into the fifth form, and I wasn’t getting the Bank as much as I’d have liked. Money was never really something that flowed towards me as a kid, and despite having a job as a chip rumbler, I was earning £10 a week and spending £4 of that on chips the moment I finished on Saturday lunchtime.
I was playing a lot of Championship Manager 93, an early cousin of the current video game giant Football Manager. It wasn’t quite as in-depth, but at the time, it felt like it, and much of my football knowledge came from the game. Now, I may be wrong here, but I have a feeling Lincoln wasn’t even in the game. I’ve no idea why that would be, but it meant that a host of Lincoln players were also not available. It didn’t stop me from enjoying it, though – I think I was usually Luton, although I’d also start as a team in the bottom division and work my way up.
Here’s where Udo comes in. This story will be familiar to a generation of gamers, but I signed Udo for one of the teams I managed (it might have been Cambridge, as they had two cheat players who could earn you a lot of money), and he was great. He was from Fulham, didn’t cost me much, and helped me get whatever team it was up the the FA Premiership, as it was called back then. Then, a couple of weeks later, I saw he was on trial at Lincoln!
Genuinely, he was immediately my favourite player, even before I’d seen him play. Did that contribute to me finding the money to get the bus to our first game of the season against Exeter? Possibly, although I seem to recall also going with a girl I liked at the time, and in turn, she liked one of the players. Maybe that was it. Anyway, four of us (two girls, two boys) ended up going and watching as City won 2-0. The first goal was created by Onwere, and before the game was out, he’d been sent off as well. That sealed the deal.
I’m not sure why a red card and what we now term as an assist (but back then, we just said he set the goal up) grabbed me, but instantly, the diminutive midfielder with some good ball control was the one I was tipping to be a star. I knew, you see. I knew he could play higher because he’d done so for me on Champ Man, and Champ Man was real.
I didn’t see as many games as I might have liked that season, but the following campaign, I got down a bit, and Onwere’s brilliance (which brought just seven league outings in his first season) was something I looked forward to seeing. He had been injured for much of the previous campaign, and in those seven matches even got himself a three-match ban for reaching 24 discipline points. It made me love him even more.
Then, in June 1995, the Outhere Brothers released a terrible song titled Boom, Boom, Boom. August 28th, 1995, I made my first trip to Sincil Bank for a game against Scunthorpe that had a bizarre ending – City trailed 1-0 with five minutes left, but as we entered the final seconds, Onwere’s penalty put us 2-1. We still drew 2-2, but all around the ground (all 1,700 home fans…) rang out a song that I still chant today – ‘Boom, boom, boom, let me hear you say Udo. Onwere’.
It was his first goal for the club – a fortnight later, he’d got three. It was a bad season to hit a bit of form – he played 33 times under three managers, and the final one, John Beck, wasn’t big on midfielders. By the time he left the club in the summer of 1996, I’d left school and his departure passed me by. I watched our 1-0 win against Premier League Derby in a friendly with Onwere in the ground, and the next day he played for us against Lincoln United, trying to earn a deal. he didn’t get one.
Life didn’t imitate art; Udo didn’t take us to the Premier League. He took himself to Dover, Barnet and Blackpool, and I always expected him to appear in our division again, a bundle of energy with a nice touch but a penchant for a yellow card, but he never did. Instead, he qualified as a lawyer, and he currently leads the Bray & Krais private client and sports offering in London.
He was still, albeit briefly and because of what he did on a video game, one of my favourite Lincoln City players.
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