There are days that remind you why you keep turning up through winter drizzle and nil-nils, and Exeter at home in 2018 was one of them.
Good Friday, a full house, tension you could taste, and a game that swung so violently you felt seasick coming out. It was a five-goal punch-up between promotion rivals, decided late, but a battle victory that, ultimately, didn’t win the war.
Before the football on Friday, March 30th, there was a moment to breathe and remember. The minute’s silence for Corporal Jonathan Bayliss, the RAF Red Arrows technician, set a tone of respect around the ground; almost 10,000 people united, still, and then ready. After that, it was chaos.
Exeter landed the first blow. Ten minutes in, Jayden Stockley’s free-kick was beaten out by Ryan Allsop, the corner followed, and the same man climbed to guide a header into the net. It was their first real foray, but it put us on the back foot and handed the visitors exactly the rhythm they wanted: slow it down, kill the noise, and ask us to solve the puzzle.
We were the better side for most of the half without the ball going where we wanted. Neal Eardley’s delicious cross skimmed off Matt Green rather than onto his boot, Elliott Whitehouse drove one just over, and the pressure was there if not the finish. Exeter did what good sides do on the road: be compact, get cynical when needed, be alive to the counter. Right before the interval they nearly snatched a second, Stockley’s effort pinging off one post then the other, the sort of moment that usually ends up on a season-review DVD with the caption “how did that stay out?”
If there was frustration in the stands, there wasn’t panic. The feeling at half-time was that we were close. The shape looked right, Whitehouse was everywhere, and the game plan felt one pass away from working.
Then came the surge that defined the day. On the hour, Whitehouse spun and hit one that Christy Pym could only palm into danger. Danny Rowe, brighter than a 1000-watt spotlight, arrived to nod in from close range. The tension evaporated in an instant. Two minutes later, it was delirium. A quick free-kick caught Exeter flat-footed, and Green leathered it from a tight angle, Pym beaten at his near post. In a blink, 0-1 had become 2-1, and Sincil Bank was a wall of noise.
What followed was messy, thrilling, and not great for the heart. We flirted with a third: Habergham’s hanging cross caused trouble, and there were claims it had crept over; Luke Waterfall came on and thumped a header against the bar; Ollie Palmer, on from the bench, powered in a header that had the place erupting until the referee ruled it out for a push, Palmer only realising when he was halfway down the A1 with his celebration.
The reprieve woke Exeter up. Jordan Storey crashed one against the frame, the rebound broke to Stockley, and only a deflection preserved the lead. You could sense something building and, on 78 minutes, Jake Taylor drove in an angled equaliser. From control to turbulence in a handful of phases, and now the clock had become a rival as well.
These are the moments where a season can wobble. We had every reason to brood over the disallowed goal and the near misses, to drop five yards and feel sorry for ourselves, but a play-off place was at stake and we needed the points. Exeter did too. In the end, they’d miss out on the top three by four points, but a win here might have given them confidence.
Instead, one of the most unorthodox forwards to wear an Imps shirt decided he had the final word. Palmer’s style has never been about elegance, but there’s a chaos to him that defenders hate. On 86 minutes, the ball broke in the box, he set himself, and lashed it home. No push, no ambiguity, just a net bulging and a centre-forward careering away on a celebration that, once again, seemed to include half the pitch. This time there was no whistle to spoil it, only the sound of a stadium again believing.
The last act was professional. Six minutes of added time felt like sixty, particularly with Exeter launching long ones and second balls ricocheting around the area. Allsop gathered what he had to; Michael Bostwick did what Michael Bostwick did all the time, and we managed the dark arts well enough to take the whistle with the ball as far from danger as possible. 3-2, and a roar that broke into applause as the players came over. It wasn’t clean, but it was ours.
Looking back, the spine of the performance tells its own story. Whitehouse stitched the midfield together and turned the first goal by sheer insistence; what might have been had he stayed, and not gone to Grimsby and got injured? Matt Green’s finish spoke to a striker who thrives on quick restarts and angles nobody else sees; Palmer was the blunt instrument at precisely the moment a blunt instrument was needed. Around them, the graft mattered: Eardley’s delivery, Habergham’s engine, Rowe’s directness. There were wobbles at the back: set-piece details and those awkward pockets down our left that Exeter targeted, but when the pressure peaked late on, the unit stood up.
This wasn’t a perfect display. Stockley caused problems all afternoon. There were periods after our quick-fire double when we lost composure, and Taylor’s leveller came from a lapse that will have irked the staff in the review. But perfection wasn’t required. Resilience was. Against a seasoned Exeter side, serious about the top end, we were brave enough to keep asking the question until the answer came.
Most of all, it felt like a proper Sincil Bank occasion, the kind that lodges in the memory. The biggest crowd of the season. The swell of noise after Rowe’s equaliser. The collective groan at the bar-rattlers. The hilarity and disbelief of Palmer’s disallowed goal, then the bedlam when he made sure nobody could take the next one off him. We won the battle, but given that they finished fourth, and us seventh, it was only the precursor to a play-off war that they got the better of us in.
That said, just six months later, we were down in Devon doling out a 3-0 thrashing as we started out on our path to the League Two title.
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