Just Another Brick In The Wall

I write a lot every day. Sometimes it is about a game that’s happening soon, and others about a game long gone.

Sometimes it’s about players and people, and sometimes I get self-indulgent and write about me. I figure as long as the subject is loosely based on football and Lincoln City, it’ll pass. It’s my site, after all.

The game against Bolton has stirred up a few memories. Bolton Wanderers were the last team Dad saw us beat, 4-2 in the rain in April, and while that wouldn’t usually warrant an article, I also ordered his memorial brick this week. You know the wall I’m talking about, near the club shop at the ground, there is a memorial display, where people can purchase a brick with 32 characters on it to commemorate a loved one. It’s a nice touch, and in the next few weeks, Dad will become another brick in the wall of lost Imps.

There is a metaphor here for the game tomorrow as well. It feels important, just like my Dad’s brick feels important to me, but if we treat it as a standalone game, it just doesn’t hold up. Bolton Wanderers at home is pivotal, a six-pointer that could give us a major edge in the race for the Championship. Or, it is one of 45 matches. Nothing is won and lost on Saturday, certainly nothing more than three points.

The last time we played them, nothing was at stake. The wall that was the 2024/25 season had been built, and we were just capping it off when we won 4-2. Reeco’s free-kick stood out; I can’t even remember the James Collins brace, nor Erik Ring’s opener. I know it rained, Dad and I met up with some readers from Australia, and we had fun. It was the week before I ran the London Marathon, and I remember worrying because I got so wet I thought I might get a cold. We even used a picture from that game, Dad in the Stacey West hoodie, on the order of service when we laid him to rest in November.

Just another brick in the wall. Just another game in a season, but they hold different significance for us all, don’t they? Saturday’s game is just about three points, and winning isn’t life or death, but for 90 minutes, it will feel that way. For 90 minutes, we go toe-to-toe with one of the best sides in the division for the right to be the brick on the top of the wall when the curtain comes down in May. It’s exciting and scary, and the sort of game we love to experience, because it makes us feel something.

Feeling something would have been difficult for me these past few months without the football. Everything has changed for me since we met the Trotters back in April. I find matches challenging at the moment, and switching the SW to a full-time concern has helped me make them feel different. If I were going into my usual seat, drinking in the usual bars, but with Dad not there, something would be missing. It still is, obviously, but now it’s my new normal, one in which Dad was never involved, so while I still feel the emptiness and loss, one of my escapes (Sincil Bank) doesn’t always trigger that. When we win, I still occasionally think about messaging him, just as when we sign a player, but because my matchday is different, I can enjoy games like Bolton now.

I don’t think people talk much about grief and the effects months after a major loss. When a person passes, people are great. As time passes, they return to normal – it’s not a brick in their wall that is missing, and rightly so, it is business as usual. Life gets back to normal, but for the person affected, it never does. Life is still normal, we still eat and sleep, games like this weekend come and go, we laugh and love and all of that. It’s just something is missing.

The one way I can describe it is like a prism. Imagine life as a prism, light hitting everything and splitting off into all these different colours. When you lose someone close, like I did my Dad, it’s like one bit of the prism doesn’t work. The light still shines through, the things that used to light you up still do, but there is one side that is just black, one side where once there was light, now there is just nothing. Sometimes, when you turn and expect light to hit you, there is just a ray of dark there, a new nothingness that briefly outshines all of the other colours. Slowly but surely, you get used to that little ray of nothing at all, accept it for what it is. There isn’t really a choice.

On Saturday, we face a game that feels fundamental, but really it is just another brick in our wall. Over 46 games, that’s how we’ll win and lose promotion, not on one (predicted) snowy afternoon in Lincoln. Still, it is nice to be coming into mid-February and be talking about promotion, and I know, were he here, Dad would be up and down his stairs, complaining about his knees, but singing (erroneously) ‘we are top of the league’.

Who knows, on the day his name begins its journey to become part of the Sincil Bank fabric, that might be exactly where we are come 5 pm. If not, then it is on to Northampton on Tuesday night, as we build towards the end of the season, one brick at a time.