What Lincoln City Can Take From A Heavy Bournemouth Defeat

We’ve played Premier League teams before and given them serious problems. Chelsea, West Ham and Everton all had uncomfortable evenings at Sincil Bank, while Liverpool were a different proposition entirely. Bournemouth felt much closer to that Liverpool experience than the others, albeit without the avalanche of goals. They moved the ball quickly, they pressed relentlessly, and they didn’t allow us to make the game into something it wasn’t. There was no snobbery from them towards the competition and no sense that they were simply waiting for the evening to finish. The players who came into their team wanted to play Premier League football and wanted to play in Europe, so there was every incentive for them to make an impression. They did.

In that sense, keeping it at 1-0 for as long as we did deserves some credit. Bournemouth were dominant for long periods, but City continued to defend, block and compete. The second goal eventually came from another moment of average defending; Christie allowed too much room from a corner and headed in unmarked, but it was still only 2-0 going into the final few minutes. The two late goals made the result look emphatic, and in fairness the statistics suggest 4-0 was not remotely unjust, but there is a distinction between being battered because you’ve folded and being beaten heavily because a very good Premier League side has relentlessly kept coming at you. I thought this was much closer to the latter.

That’s why I can’t get especially angry about the scoreline. I don’t think I’ve ever watched Lincoln lose 4-0 and felt quite so unmoved by it the following morning. Usually there is something gnawing away at you, some moment you keep revisiting or some sense that we’ve let ourselves down. I don’t have that here. We were beaten by a much better team, and saying that isn’t the same as giving them a free pass or suggesting City did everything perfectly. We didn’t attack well, we didn’t create enough, and we struggled to implement what we wanted to do. But there is context. Bournemouth are a serious Premier League side, and their so-called fringe players would probably walk into the vast majority of Championship teams.

That made it a particularly difficult night for Ladefoged. The game largely passed him by, but I don’t think that’s something you can use as evidence against him. He was trying to play against Premier League centre-halves in a game where we barely had the ball in useful areas. He can be a physical handful, and we know he knows where the goal is, but there was no platform for him. Balls into him were being cleaned up almost immediately, and he was having to deal with defenders operating at a level above anything he has regularly faced before. If anything, it was probably valuable for him to experience that now, because there will not be many Championship centre-halves quite as good as the ones he faced at Bournemouth.

The same applies to a few others. Oyegoke looked raw at times, but I liked him. There were two or three challenges where his timing was outstanding, and he showed an aggression I think we’re going to need. The challenge he was booked for wasn’t one of his better ones, but I liked the fact that he was getting into opponents and making his presence felt. He was in Soler’s ear early on, competitive and abrasive, and there is something to work with there. Championship football is going to contain plenty of quick, technical wide players, and sometimes you need somebody prepared to get right into them rather than stand off and admire what they can do.

I thought Ryley Towler performed well again, and Callum Elder did plenty of good defensive work despite walking the disciplinary tightrope for much of the game. Jefferies grafted incredibly hard as well. He was exposed once or twice, but when you’re being asked to deal with players of this quality, that is going to happen. I am not convinced we’ll see him playing huge numbers of minutes at right wing-back once everyone is fully settled, simply because there are now several options in those areas, but that’s not a criticism of him. That’s the squad evolving. Every year, the level rises, and players who were important 12 months ago suddenly have more competition. They haven’t necessarily got worse; the water around them has simply risen.

That’s something worth remembering before writing anyone off on the back of this game. Some of our players will have learned more about themselves from playing Bournemouth than we learned about them. Jefferies started his career a long way from this level and has worked his way up. The next time he faces a £20 million winger, he’ll have this experience behind him. The same goes for plenty of the squad. You improve by being exposed to better players and being forced to find solutions. You discover which touches you can get away with, which passes have to be played quicker, when you can commit to a challenge and when you simply have to stay on your feet.

Ogbene was another positive, although with him it is less about discovering anything and more about getting him onto the pitch. He was full of running, and he gives us another way of carrying the ball up the field. I don’t actually think outright pace is the central pillar of how this City side attacks, because so much of what we do is about taking territory, forcing teams backwards and then pinning them there with crosses, throws and pressure. There are plenty of occasions where we could break quickly but instead recycle the ball and allow the opposition to retreat because we want to play the next phase in their half. Even so, having somebody who can move us 30 or 40 yards up the pitch under pressure is extremely valuable, and Ogbene can provide that.

He’s also a smooth talker, isn’t he? His post-match interview, where he volunteers a comment on the travelling support, rather than being asked, was pure post-match porn for fans. We love getting excited by a player who gets it, and Ogbene forcing the comments in proved he gets it. Oyegoke in Soler’s ear, telling him to get up, is another moment we can get behind. Two new signings, already in credit.

Ultimately, I don’t think there was much shame in the performance. There were things City did badly; the attacking output was almost non-existent, and some of the defending for the goals will be picked apart, but it was still 2-0 with five minutes left against a Premier League side who never stopped coming. Bournemouth hadn’t put out a collection of academy players and reserves. They fielded serious players and then brought serious players off the bench. They treated the game with respect, and eventually the scoreline reflected the dominance they had enjoyed.

The most important thing now is how quickly the relevance of Bournemouth disappears. Preston away already feels like a completely different type of contest because it is. Three or four weeks ago, we’d have looked at Preston and thought it was an extremely difficult Championship away game. Now we’ve already seen enough to know City can go to places like that and compete. We might lose, of course, because that’s the Championship, but we can go there believing there is something available to us. If we come away from Preston with a positive result, nobody is going to spend Saturday night worrying about what happened at Bournemouth.

That is probably the real value of this game. It showed us a level we aspire to reach without telling us very much about whether we’re capable of competing in the Championship. Bournemouth are not the benchmark for Lincoln City this season. Preston, Bristol City and Blackburn are. What happened on the south coast was a glimpse of something further up the football pyramid, and for some of our players it will have been a fairly brutal lesson in just how quickly the game moves when you reach it.