Lincoln City have been labelled long ball merchants this season, classed as ‘anti-football’.
Stephen Eustáquio, who twice feigned injury trying to get an opponent punished for something which was not a foul, was delighted ‘football won’ after his deflected strike against us this weekend. There is an irony in a man who twice tried to deceive an official, criticising an opponent’s tactic, but we need to get used to it. After all, long ball football has spent decades being declared outdated, usually because somebody finds another way to make it work.
Lincoln City sit at the heart of that history, both through managers whose achievements demonstrated its potential and those who became the unfortunate face of its supposed failure. The snobbery around the tactic will never go away, but in truth, long ball football has evolved and will continue to do so.
Hull City were third-highest for long balls in the Championship last season, and earned promotion to the Premier League. Bradford City played the most in League One and made the play-offs in their first season out of the basement division, while champions Bromley were sixth for long passes in League Two. All were teams unfancied at the start of the season, and all utilised the tactic to their advantage.
This season, Bradford remain top of the long passes numbers in League One, and top of the table. Barnet, with 63 long passes per ninety, are top of the League Two table and the long passes table. Lincoln City, tipped to be relegated by Christmas, top the Championship table for long passes, but the super footballing side bossed by the yelping Canadian Eustáquio, Swansea City, not only top the actual table, but are fourth for long passes. Ouch.
The long ball game is not new. Its statistical foundations emerged in the 1950s through Charles Reep, a former RAF officer who recorded stats from matches by hand. A pioneer, Reep observed that most goals followed passing sequences of three passes or fewer, helping underpin an approach built around moving the ball forward quickly, applying pressure near the opposition goal and collecting second balls. Charles Hughes subsequently promoted direct football through his influential coaching work at the FA.
There was a problem with the reasoning, however. Short passing sequences were much more common, so their accounting for more goals did not automatically make them more effective. Counting how many goals followed a particular approach was different from establishing how frequently that approach succeeded. Equally, a goal scored after three passes did not necessarily involve a long ball.
Graham Taylor nevertheless showed what organised direct football could achieve. He is celebrated for utilising direct football to take Watford from the Fourth Division to second in the First Division, but our 1976 title win, with record points, was where it all started. His success challenged the assumption that clubs needed to match richer opponents pass for pass. Getting the ball forward, forcing defenders into uncomfortable situations and supporting the attack could close the gap.
Other clubs provided their own examples. Under Dave Bassett, Wimbledon climbed from the Fourth Division to the First, becoming one of the teams most closely associated with direct football. Bassett subsequently took Sheffield United through successive promotions to the top flight, reinforcing the appeal of an approach which could deliver results without the resources of the established elite. The football elite sneered as the ball often got lumped aimlessly towards John Fashanu or Brian Deane, but early long ball really was about percentages. Get it forward, anywhere, and pick up the pieces.
We also continued to play more direct. It wasn’t quite as blatant as the Crazy Gang, but Dario Gradi was critical of Colin Murphy’s Imps in the nineties, following on from similar criticism from Malcolm MacDonald in 1982. Murphy knew getting from back to front quickly could be successful, and few managers have two promotions with Lincoln City on their CV, justifying his choices. The one season he tried to play more football, 1989/90, he departed at the end. Allan Clarke came in, tried to shift our identity further, and what happened? He was sacked; Murphy’s captain Steve Thompson stepped in and up went the ball again.
At Cambridge United, John Beck pushed long ball ideas further. His side won successive promotions and reached the Second Division play-offs in 1992, with Dion Dublin and Steve Claridge among the forwards who flourished under him. Cambridge became notorious for sending the ball into the corners, even allowing the grass there to grow longer to slow it down. Whatever opponents thought of the spectacle, there was considerable planning behind it.
We saw that. Beck was a super footballer, slick and skilled, but he was a master of the game. Way ahead of his time, he worked out the best way to win on a budget, and he implemented it rigorously. Fail to carry out his commands, and you were off, as Mark Hone once found out. Beck was barracked and booed in his final game because of the style of football. Two months later, 9,000 packed into the Bank to watch it earn us a first promotion to the third tier in more than a decade.
Graham Taylor’s England came before Beck’s Lincoln, but they did start to nail shut the coffin lids on long ball football. The failure to qualify for the 1994 World Cup became a defining argument against Taylor and the football associated with him. A disastrous qualifying campaign was treated as evidence that the wider philosophy belonged in the past, allowing years of achievement at club level to disappear beneath the criticism. Long ball was a failure and England were a failure because of it; that was the assessment.
Yet there is an awkward hole in that version of events: Norway. England drew 1-1 with them at Wembley and lost 2-0 away during that campaign, results which did considerable damage to our qualification hopes. One of the teams exposing England’s shortcomings was itself playing direct football. Those qualifying results hardly support a straightforward story about the death of long ball.
Under Egil Olsen, Norway used a carefully organised approach involving long passes, aerial contests and players positioned to exploit the next ball. Jostein Flo was a particularly clear example of a player being used to make the system work. Although a centre-forward at club level, he could operate on the right for Norway, receiving diagonal deliveries and heading them towards supporting teammates. The familiar “Flo pass” turned his aerial strength into a repeatable attacking weapon.
Norway reached both the 1994 and 1998 World Cups, making it difficult to argue that Taylor’s England failure had proved the method itself unworkable. Jack Charlton’s Republic of Ireland were another prominent international side associated with direct football, further undermining the idea that it was simply an English habit which could not travel.
The difference? Perhaps that long ball football suits the underdogs. Lincoln City have rarely been the biggest spenders in a division. At any time in history you can look at us and then see other clubs spending much more on so-called better footballers. Chesterfield, Rushden, Darlington and Bristol Rovers are teams from the nineties and noughties who outbought, but rarely outfought Lincoln City, playing a bit more direct.
Case in point: 2002/03. Keith Alexander has peanuts to spend, scraping up non-league gems. A big man, Dene Cropper, to aim at. Some pace around him, in Simon Yeo, and then just more big men. Shayne Bradley, Chris Ward, central defenders, they all had a go at nodding those long balls on. Nobody liked it, except us, and we made the play-offs with a budget eclipsed by several non-league sides. Some fans might turn their noses up at long ball football, but most fans like winning football. The two are sometimes not mutually exclusive.
English football has gradually changed. Overseas influences and the success of possession football encouraged greater emphasis on shorter passing. By December 2013, the Guardian reported that just 18% of Premier League passes that season travelled more than 25 metres, a lower proportion than in the other major European leagues examined. That was evidence of a gradual shift, rather than a tactic suddenly dying in 1993.
Tony Pulis’s Stoke City nevertheless showed how effective a direct approach could remain. Their organisation restricted opponents’ opportunities in dangerous areas, while their own attacking game placed considerable value on set pieces. Stoke consistently scored half their league goals from set pieces between 2008 and 2013, and they introduced another interesting component: the long throw. Rory Delap wasn’t the first to hurl the ball in like a corner. Ironically, given the comments from the weekend, Swansea City man Andy Legg was turning throws into danger in the seasons before.
Sam Allardyce was another enduring advocate of direct football, keeping the argument alive well into an era increasingly dominated by possession. These managers weren’t quite as blatant as Bassett, but they tweaked the formula, developing Reep’s philosophy, honing and refining it for the new era.
Danny and Nicky Cowley played direct, but again, not the same as Murphy or Beck. Balls did go back to front quicker; we did unsettle teams as much as possible, put them off their stride. Football isn’t meant to be played any particular way at all. Those who try to play short passes and slick football do so with decent players who cost more and more. Somehow, teams have to find a way to compete, and even when we were top five budget in 2018/19, we won the league. We still outperformed where money said we should finish, and we did it by shaping, adapting and developing Reep’s formula.
Even among more fashionable sides, the long pass retained its uses. ESPN’s January 2025 analysis highlighted Liverpool and Bournemouth’s success with passes over opposition defences, despite long balls becoming less common across the league overall. It also underlined a distinction often lost in the argument: an accurate pass into space and a hopeful clearance are not the same thing. We see that at Lincoln sometimes, the accurate ball forward by Wickens. Yes, our approach is perhaps more aligned with the long ball of old, looking for a big centre forward to win the ball, but there are new bells and whistles. We don’t need to pick up the second ball straight away; instead, we high press, look to force errors. We load the box for set pieces, just as Arsenal did last season, and that is fashionable: Scott Fry got a mention on NTT20 this week for his set piece work at Birmingham, having gone there from Rangers. We pioneered the set piece coach approach: Scott was our keeper coach, remember.
Long ball doesn’t mean anti-football, even if sneering opposition fans think it does. It’s the lazy analysis, the easy go-to when you lose, the smug sword to swing when you win. I’d rather see a long ball brought down to start an attack than a £4m World Cup star rolling around on the floor like a pheasant struck by a car. What is more anti-football? Fighting for second ball, getting crosses and corners into the box, or repeatedly feigning injury to get an opponent punished for a crime they didn’t commit? You’ll get a different answer from most fans, but I know which I prefer.
I want to bring this back around to the much-maligned Graham Taylor. The 1994 qualifying campaign is often held up as an example of when it went wrong, but it’s important to dissect it properly. We were robbed in the Netherlands when Koeman should have been sent off. We had the same results (a draw and a defeat) against Norway as the ‘total football’ Netherlands side. The ‘humiliating’ 7-1 win against San Marino was the second highest on their ground, and by the time qualification finished, Norway and Netherlands were top ten in the FIFA rankings. Taylor’s achievements deserved more consideration than a label which bundled every direct approach together, and he was far more than a long ball merchant who got found out at England level.
The same can be said now of Chris Cohen and Tom Shaw, the coaches at the helm of this so-called anti-football team. The principles of gaining territory quickly, putting defenders under pressure and competing for possession near goal remain as useful today as they have in the past. Graham Taylor, Colin Murphy, John Beck, Keith Alexander and even Michael Skubala have fine-tuned and adapted the process for us, but long-ball football is part of our DNA. I prefer to think of it as direct, playing percentages, causing chaos and making the very most of the resources available to you in order to win football matches, something that we’ve been quite good at over the last ten years.
At the end of it all, long ball football done right can be winning football, and that is a style every single fan can get behind.
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