I appreciate some of my favourite Imps are not ones you’d describe as legends, and that’s certainly the case with striker Peter Costello.
That said, he was one of my favourites for a short period of time, and a player I feel i’d like to give a mention to on these hallowed pages. There’s a great reason Peter Costello became one of my favourite players, and it all starts with a 6-0 home defeat.
The year is 1991. We’ve recently climbed out of the Conference after a titanic battle with Barnet, who then failed to get out for the next two years. Finally, Barry Fry brought our old rivals back ot the Bank, and our first meeting came in September 1991, the first since we’d beaten them 2-1 in a battle. Hopes were high that we might hand out another bloody nose, but instead, we lost 6-0.
It was a humbling night. Back then, we didn’t have a TV with Teletext; there was no way of checking the score other than ringing the ground. That’s what my Dad did – every 20 minutes or so, whenever the TV show he was watching went on a break, he’d call the ground for an update from an ever-irate person on the end of the phone. At 4-0 down, he stopped, and the real damage, 6-0, was only discovered the following morning in the newspaper. Nightmare.
Manager Steve Thompson was not a happy man, and given the injuries we had at the time, he decided to move for a 21-year-old called Peter Costello. Paul Dobson, Tony Lormor and David Puttnam were all injured, so in came Costello to partner Jason Lee up top.
Who was Peter Costello? Used as a striker or midfielder, he started his career with Bradford City, playing around 20 games over two seasons in the Second Division. He transferred to Fourth Division Rochdale for £10,000 in the summer of 1990 and had scored 13 goals by the following March, prompting Peterborough United to pay £30,000 for him, as they always seem to do with lower league successes. By September 1991, he had only made a single sub appearance for Posh, making him available to us.
He played just three times in his first spell. Two of those games saw him forging a strong partnership with Jason Lee, and City won twice. In his third game he fell foul of the injury curse, went off with a dislocated shoulder, and returned to Peterborough, possibly to be never seen again. At that stage, he wasn’t a player who had figured significantly in the life of 13-year-old Gary Hutchinson, all ginger hair and pale skin, occasionally standing on the Railway End terrace with his Dad. No, after just one outing at the Bank, a home defeat, and a game I wasn’t at, it’s fair to say he would have been as likely to feature in a section called ‘my favourite Imps’ as Drewe Broughton or Ben Hutchinson.
A year later, with his shoulder back where it should be, he became one of a number of returning loan players, choosing the Imps in a £15,000 permanent move. He came at the same time as keeper Mike Pollitt, still fresh-faced, albeit a year older. He appeared four times before I saw him, grabbing a goal on his third outing away at Bury.
Next up, his fifth outing; Barnet at Sincil Bank. Only a year after the humiliating defeat, Dad managed to find the pennies in his pocket to take me to the game, hoping for something better than the 6-0 defeat. For me, football is all about being there, and the performance of our new number ten left an indelible mark on me that day, which remains to this very day. I’m not sure why. Perhaps it’s because they felt like the first rivalry I’d encountered as a fan. I’d been there the night the police escorted Fry from the field. I’d seen us tussle with them for promotion, and experience the pain of that 6-0 defeat in my Dad’s eyes. this game meant something long before I knew what a Codhead was.
Costello had a great game, but so did City. He opened the scoring in the 33rd minute, and after Barnet levelled, Graham Bressington added a second, and Jason Lee grabbed two more. You’d think it would have been Lee who I went home emulating, but it was the slick, skillful Costello. In my eyes, a legend was born. He had started the rout, he had stood out as a driving force for me. When he bagged a brace a week later to make it four goals in three games, he sealed the deal. Peter Costello was a genius.
A week or two later, we went to the fair and my brother and I both won a goldfish. Bowls purchased, we headed home to Wragby and were urged to name our new friends. Mine was called Costello, and sadly (not for the fish), he outlived his namesake’s stay at Lincoln.
He (the player, not the fish) hit a brace against Doncaster to help us to a 2-0 win, witnessed again by me, which only confirmed that he was going to play in the Premier League, just as I was convinced David Puttnam was. However, another dislocated shoulder in February saw him miss a portion of the season, and when he came back, he struggled to get into the side.
He never regained his place properly. Steve Thompson was relieved of his duties before the end of the season, and Costello found himself down the pecking order in the 1993/94 season. He went out on loan to Halifax but only played twice before returning to the Bank, but still football didn’t come his way. Disgruntled, he put in a transfer request, and given that Keith Alexander’s side were doing well, nobody stood in his way.
He spent time on loan at Kettering before returning to the club. He couldn’t get a game, until out of the blue, he got three games in a week! One of note was our Autoglass Windscreens Quarter Final against Carlisle, where he is described as ‘running the midfield’ and almost teeing up Neil Matthews for a 115th-minute Imps goal, which would have brought penalties. That was his last appearance, a cold night at Brunton Park, before he was allowed to join Kettering on loan, before leaving permanently in the summer. Whilst he was away, Keith’s Imps struggled. In 22 post-Christmas games, we were at the bottom of the form table. Costello wasn’t the only person to leave that summer; Keith followed him out of the door.
That was that. His career then took him around the world, to Dover Athletic, Telford United, Nuneaton Borough, South Africa (if Wikipedia is to be believed) Mansion (Hong Kong), Instant Dict (Hong Kong), Golden (Hong Kong), and Kettering Town, before he settled at Boston United, whom he helped to Football League promotion. He even appeared at the Bank again, for the Pilgrims at Christmas 2002.
It’s odd he didn’t reach double figures for City and turned out fewer times than Joe Walsh, but he still invokes something in me whenever I hear his name. Very few of my pets have been named after Lincoln players (Forrester the Parrott fish, Sedgemore the Guinea Pig, and the chickens, Rheady and Akinde, spring to mind). Costello was the first, and for the record, long after he left, his little golden-finned namesake was in Dad’s pond, growing to four times the size he had in my bowl.
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