29 years ago today, the Imps dispensed with the services of manager Sam Ellis after a horrible start to the 95/96 season.
These were tough days at the club, and tough days for me as well! I had just returned to Queen Elizabeth’s Grammar School Sixth Form, an awkward 16-year-old who had spent a summer working on the roads with my dad to earn some money. It should have been a huge summer for me, post GCSE, but instead, I grafted five days a week until around the opening day of the season, when we beat Preston North End 2-1.
We won that game 2-1, and the day before, Dad dropped me off at the ground with my weekly wages, and I bought him and me the new shirt. I still have mine, the first new one I’d had since the early 90s, and the one I bought Dad now hangs on the wall of my mate Matt’s pool room. Dean West and David Puttnam scored against the title favourites, and I was convinced everything was going to be okay.
We then lost twice against Notts County in the League Cup (2-0 and 2-0_, as well as going down against Gillingham (3-0) at the Bank. Further defeats against Colchester (3-0) and Barnet (3-1) convinced the board to pull the plug on Ellis’s tenure, much to the disappointment on no-one. Ellis had been a huge success as a player at the Bank, but his football was awful, and his one full season, 94/95, was largely unremarkable.
Ellis arrived after Keith Alexander had been dismissed at the end of the 1993/94 season, but it was little surprise – the 1976 Fourth Division winner had been with the club in an ‘advisory’ role for a couple of months, during which results turned sour. When Keith got the heave-ho, Sam stepped up.
Back-to-back 2-0 home wins at the start of that season, against Exeter and Chester, gave fans hope for a good campaign, but it never happened. The Imps played a long ball style and while we never looked in danger of the drop, we rarely threatened the top of the table. A League Cup game against Crystal Palace at the Bank brought a 1-0 win, but the Premier League side turned the deficit into a 3-1 aggregate win after referee Gary Willard played six minutes of injury time in the second leg, something unheard of at the time.
Another cup run, this time in the FA Cup, saw Huddersfield and Hull beaten before another trip to Selhurst Park, this time with us on the end of a 5-1 thrashing. Those cup runs masked an ordinary league season, with eight wins from 20 after New Year’s Day in the league, but just six from 18 after January 28th. It was a poor end to a season that really only stood out because of the cup, and yet we still finished 11th.
That led to a summer of recruitment, with fan favourites Paul Smith and Tony Lormor among those given the chop by Ellis. He brought in the likes of Phil Daley, Paul Mudd and Jason Minett, but results were poor. Even a £42,500 fee splurged on Joe Allon didn’t bring joy, and a move for veteran Gary Megson didn’t work out – he’d looked good in the summer and featured in four matches but was allowed to leave just two weeks before Ellis left.
Once the decision was made, in the aftermath of a 3-1 defeat against Barnet, which saw City drop into the bottom four John Reames admitted we’d had a decent budget.“It is mainly down to the position in which the club finds itself despite a large investment on the playing side,” confessed Reames, when announcing Ellis’s dismissal just a month into the new season. “We were going in a direction we didn’t want to go. But now we are totally going to change things.”
The move brought mixed opinions from Imps supporters—some saw it as the right decision, but many blamed the board for the disaster. However, the club was excited about a new manager, a head coach, who would change the club’s structure. Perhaps ahead of its time, the idea was for Steve Wicks to come in to oversee the football side of the business, leaving the business side to the board. Despite being very much the model of the future, that lasted 42 days. Perhaps, in 42 days time, I’ll do an article on that as well! (Edit – just realised I’ve already done it here).
However, 29 years ago today, the internet wasn’t a thing, and so everyone had to phone the Echo and vent their frustrations – and I’ll leave you with a proper meltdown by a fanbase, a justified one, rather than a bit of backlash after an EFL Trophy game.
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