Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw: Is The New Lincoln City Era Really New At All?

There is something slightly strange about calling this a new Lincoln City era.

Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw have now done their first interviews as the men leading Lincoln City, and from the outside, it should feel like one of those clean breaks football clubs talk about so often. New title, new dynamic, new level, new scrutiny. Michael Skubala has gone, the Championship is waiting, and the Imps are preparing for a season unlike any most supporters have known.

And yet, the more Chris and Tom have spoken, the less it has felt like a hard reset.

That, really, is the oddity of this summer. Managerial change usually brings disruption. It brings a different voice, different methods, sometimes a different squad and almost always a different mood. Go back through Lincoln’s recent and not-so-recent history, and that pattern is clear enough. Colin Murphy to Allan Clarke, Allan Clarke to Steve Thompson, Thompson to Keith Alexander, Alexander to Sam Ellis, later Peter Jackson wiping the slate clean, and so on. Even when success carried over, the feel of the club shifted. John Schofield followed Keith Alexander into another play-off season, but nobody would mistake the Schofield and Deehan side for a simple continuation of what had gone before.

This time, the line is much more blurred.

Chris and Tom were already there. They were not watching from the car park, waiting to impose their own ideas. They were part of the day-to-day work. They were in the meetings, on the grass, in the analysis, involved in the planning and delivery that helped us become what we were under Skubala. David Preece remains part of that wider football structure too, along with the analysts and staff who helped build the detail behind performances last season. So yes, we have lost their head coach. They have not lost the whole operation.

It does not mean Skubala was incidental, because he clearly was not. He was the figurehead of one of the most successful league campaigns in the club’s history, certainly in terms of points, consistency and the level of achievement. To pretend he was just a man standing in front of a machine would be unfair. But it is equally fair to say the machine still exists. The coaches who helped spot weaknesses, prepare the details, and deliver the messages are now the ones at the front of the room.

That is why the club rhetoric around Chris and Tom has been so interesting. There has been no great attempt to create distance from what came before. No grand unveiling of a new philosophy. No need to tell supporters everything is about to be different. The message has been steadier than that: we were part of it, we know what worked, and we intend to keep building. I remember when Michael Appleton came in, the players were giving interviews saying nothing needed changing, but behind the scenes, Appleton was removing the heart of the Cowley era. The rhetoric and the actuality lacked cohesion, but now, it does not.

For the players, that may be reassuring. They will return to familiar faces at the EPC, familiar routines and broadly familiar expectations. There will be changes, of course, there have to be. Chris and Tom are no longer assistants; they are the decision-makers. But this is not a new manager arriving with his own entourage and a folder full of demands. It is internal progression.

For supporters, it feels different when any manager changes, which is the case. Once the face of an organisation goes, the emotional contract changes with him. Had Skubala stayed, he would have entered the Championship with enormous credit. Barring a disaster of historic proportions, he would probably have been given the season. After what he had achieved, that would have been fair.

Chris and Tom inherit the same target, but perhaps not the same patience, and that is the danger. Success for Lincoln this season is survival. It was survival under Skubala, and it remains survival now. Nothing has changed in that regard. Finish outside the bottom three and the season has worked. Even taking it to the final day would not necessarily be a failure, given the jump in level and the financial landscape around the Championship.

Yet perception has shifted. Chris and Tom, in some supporters’ eyes, have something to prove, not because the target is higher, but because the trust has to be earned in a different way. Skubala had already banked his evidence. These two have contributed to it, but they have not yet carried it in public.

With Tom, supporters probably feel they know a little more. He has been around the club for a long time, through academy roles, first-team work and his interim spell after Mark Kennedy left. That spell should not be dismissed, by the way. He picked up a damaged squad, with injuries in key areas and a dressing room that needed steadying. He did not solve everything, but he helped calm the place. He even got a brief tune out of Hakeeb Adelakun, and that counts for something.

Remember, there were calls for him to be appointed back then, and it’s my understanding that since then, he has reached the final two for a League One managerial role. We’re not talking a wet-behind-the-ears coach here, but we are talking about a man who feels more Lincoln City than almost any of the other options we might have taken.

There is also a warmth to Tom. He comes across as engaging, sharp, funny and comfortable in his role. He feels like someone players would gravitate towards, not because he is soft, but because he appears able to build relationships without forcing them, maybe in the same way Danny Cowley and Michael Skubala did. That has value inside a football club, especially when pressure begins to bite.

Chris is different in terms of fans’ perception, as he is less familiar to many. His playing career at West Ham and Nottingham Forest, followed by coaching roles at places such as Luton, Southampton and Stoke, gives him a different weight. He has been around big players and big environments. He has also returned to Lincoln more than once, which suggests the connection is more than convenient. His interview spoke of coming ‘back for good’ which, aside from immediately getting me humming Take That, did sound like more than a leisurely soundbite designed to curry favour.

Put the two together, and the appeal becomes obvious. Tom has deep club knowledge and a route that has taken him through the lower levels of coaching. Chris brings experience from higher up the game, including Premier League environments. One knows the building inside out. The other has seen what bigger buildings look and feel like. That does not guarantee success, but it does make the appointment easy to understand, even stripping away the fact they’re doing much the same as last season, just this time their heads are on the block.

The comparison that keeps coming back to me is Schofield and Deehan in 2006-07. There, too, Lincoln had internal knowledge paired with broader experience. Schofield, like Tom, had ascended to the main role in the club. Deehan, like Chris, had been there and done that. Of course, there are differences, but that appointment feels the most like this one. For a while, it worked brilliantly. That side still feels like its own thing now, though, not merely an extension of Keith Alexander’s years. That may be where Chris and Tom eventually land. At the moment, they are being spoken about as continuity. In time, they will either become their own era or be judged as the end of the last one.

That is what makes this so fascinating. City are entering a new division with a coaching team that is both new and not new. The club has changed, but perhaps less than it usually does. The voices at the front are different, but not unfamiliar. The structure has shifted, but it has not been torn down. The players are stepping up, but at the time of writing, we know every single one of them.

We have not learned everything about Chris and Tom this week. We have learned how they stand together, how they talk about the work, and how keen they are not to make this about ego or theatre. We have seen enough to understand the intention, if not yet the outcome.

The truth is that none of this means anything until the football starts. Not at the first press conference, not at the fixture release event, not in the careful language of continuity. It starts when the Imps kick a ball in anger, whether that is at Derby in the cup or Middlesbrough in the league.

Until then, I feel slightly more confident than I did. Not blindly confident, because this division will be brutal. We are being dropped into a bigger pond, with bigger clubs, bigger squads and far fewer obvious weaknesses to exploit. Last season, we outperformed expectations by miles. This time, they only need to outperform their budget by enough to stay up, but the scale of the challenge is far greater.

Still, there is something reassuring in the fact that Lincoln City, after Michael Skubala, currently feels a lot like Lincoln City with Michael Skubala, just without him standing in the middle of it.

That might sound contradictory. Maybe it is. But it is also the reality of this appointment. Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw are not starting again. They are trying to keep something alive while making it theirs. Whether they can do both will define the season.