On Wednesday, I did a Top Ten Strikers For Scoring Past Lincoln City article. It featured what Transfermarkt claimed were the ten strikers who scored the most against Lincoln City.
However, the data was not complete. It included players from this century, and those stretching back into our old Second Division days, but it had gaps. Nothing pre-war. Nothing from those many, many years we were in the Third and Fourth Divisions, or the early days of the Second and Third Divisions.
Gary Parle, a man with the most insane Lincoln City knowledge ever, contacted me to suggest four players who had scored ten or more goals against the Imps, joining Bedford Jezzard and Johnny Haynes. The distinct irony is that three of those players, we once owned, and between them, they managed one goal for us!
I’d also had Kev Barwise suggest a name, which Gary confirmed (anyone who read the old Deranged Ferret fanzines will be getting a memory lane trip now), and so I have collated five more players the Imps hated playing against.
Andy Flounders – 9 Goals
Flounders was a striker whose senior career began early at Hull City, where he broke into the first team as a teenager during a difficult period for the club. He developed from a young forward being used in a struggling side into a reliable goalscorer, playing a part in Hull’s rise through the divisions under Colin Appleton and Brian Horton. Although he was not always an automatic starter, Flounders became an important squad figure, contributing heavily in promotion-winning seasons and producing some memorable scoring runs, including hat-tricks and key goals during Hull’s climb from the Fourth Division to the Second Division.
After leaving Hull in 1987, Flounders enjoyed the most prolific spell of his Football League career with Scunthorpe United, where he became a consistent scorer and reached 100 senior goals for the club in 242 appearances. He later moved to Rochdale for £80,000 and continued to find the net regularly before loan spells with Rotherham United and Carlisle United, followed by short stays with Halifax Town and Northampton Town.
Loved a goal against Lincoln so much, he bagged nine.
Joe Allon – 10 Goals
Allon came through at Newcastle United, where he was part of the club’s 1985 FA Youth Cup-winning side and made a handful of First Division appearances before leaving for Swansea City in 1987. He found regular senior football in Wales, helped Swansea win promotion through the Fourth Division play-offs, and then returned to the North East with Hartlepool United in 1988, where his career truly caught fire. After a difficult start in a struggling side, Allon became central to Hartlepool’s revival, scoring heavily across the next two seasons and playing a major role in their 1990-91 promotion campaign, a year in which he was named in the Fourth Division PFA Team of the Year. During this period, he netted on four occasions against the Imps.
That form earned him a move to Chelsea in 1991, but despite scoring early at Stamford Bridge, he never became a regular and later rebuilt his career with Brentford and Port Vale, where he again showed he could score consistently at Football League level. His brief spell with Lincoln City came in 1995, before he returned to Hartlepool for a second spell that carried real emotional weight, not least when he scored crucial late-season goals to help keep the club in the League in 1997. Of course, more of those goals came against us – I think there was one game in which he didn’t score before knee problems eventually forced his retirement in 1998.
Tommy Tynan – 11 Goals
Tynan began with Liverpool, earning his opportunity as a teenager after winning a newspaper talent contest, but he never made a senior appearance for the club. A productive loan spell with Swansea City, where he scored freely, helped launch a career that soon took him to Sheffield Wednesday, where he scored 31 league goals in 91 appearances. His brief stay with Lincoln City in 1978 was far less successful, bringing only nine league games and one goal, but that short spell proved to be a rare misstep in a career otherwise defined by regular goalscoring.
Tynan rebuilt his reputation superbly at Newport County, forming a prolific partnership with John Aldridge, helping the club win promotion, lift the Welsh Cup and reach the quarter-finals of the European Cup Winners’ Cup. He later became a Plymouth Argyle legend, scoring heavily across two spells, playing in the side that reached the 1984 FA Cup semi-final and finishing as joint top scorer across all four Football League divisions in 1984-85. He also had spells with Rotherham United, Torquay United and Doncaster Rovers, ending his league career with 259 goals from 646 appearances and a reputation as one of the most natural finishers of his era.
Jimmy Carmichael – 12 Goals
Jimmy Carmichael was a Scottish centre-forward who made his name as one of Grimsby Town’s great early goalscorers. He began with Strathclyde before moving to Mid Rhondda, but his progress was interrupted by service in the First World War. After joining Grimsby in 1920, he was converted from centre-half into a forward, a switch that transformed his career and helped turn him into the Mariners’ leading scorer for five successive seasons.
His peak came in 1921-22, when he scored 37 league goals in 37 games, the highest total in the Football League that season. Carmichael remained prolific throughout the 1920s, scoring more than 20 league goals in several campaigns, captaining Grimsby and helping them win the Third Division North title in 1925-26. He was also a regular thorn in Lincoln City’s side, with his scoring record including a hat-trick against the Imps, before ending his Grimsby career with 137 league goals in 227 appearances and later moving on to Worksop Town.
Tommy McCairns – 15 Goals
McCairns set a Grimsby Town club record for goals in a league game by netting six times in a 7-1 win over Leicester Fosse at Abbey Park in Division Two, which is a record that still stands today. 14 of his 15 goals against us came while wearing Grimsby colours, between 1893 and 1899. We must have got sick of him, because we signed him! He scored 14 times for us in total, on three separate occasions against Arsenal, and even saw his contract terminated briefly in 1900, only to be taken back on later in the season. Left for Barnsley in 1901 and, of course, scored against us the following season.
Bedford Jezzard and Johnny Haynes may have scored plenty of goal against us but I have a fond memory of them both being in the Fulham side on the day we smashed six fgoals past at Sincil Bank!!!