With West Ham United next up for Lincoln City, our latest Good, Bad and Ugly looks at three familiar names with connections to both clubs.
The premise is simple: someone we remember fondly, someone whose contribution left rather less to celebrate, and someone whose story needs a little more consideration.
This time, those connections take us from a goalkeeper the supporters helped buy to a member of a disastrous management team, before finishing with a talented midfielder who left us wondering what might have been.
The Good: Peter Grotier
There can be few better ways to establish a bond between a player and supporters than having those supporters help pay his transfer fee. Peter Grotier arrived on loan from West Ham in 1974, having joined the Hammers as a youngster in 1966 but struggled to establish himself as their regular goalkeeper. Graham Taylor quickly decided he wanted to keep him, and when the money wasn’t there to complete the deal, the people of Lincoln answered his appeal, with fans and businesses digging deep.
They certainly got their money’s worth. Grotier made 134 consecutive appearances for us and was ever-present during the record-breaking 1975/76 campaign, giving Taylor a dependable presence behind one of the finest teams we have ever produced. His selection in the PFA Division Four Team of the Year in both his first two seasons underlined his standing, while 263 league and cup appearances tell their own story about his importance at Sincil Bank.
His time here extended beyond the glory of 1976, through the decline that followed Taylor’s departure, but his place in our history was already secure. There is something particularly fitting about a player bought with the help of the city becoming such an important part of its most celebrated side. West Ham gave him his start, but Lincoln gave him the stage on which he became a club legend.
The Bad: Paul Brush
Paul Brush’s West Ham credentials are considerably more appealing than his Lincoln ones. An academy product, he made 151 league appearances for the Hammers and was their unused substitute in the 1980 FA Cup final, before later playing for Crystal Palace and Southend United. His coaching partnership with Steve Tilson also brought successive promotions at Southend, which helps explain why their arrival at Sincil Bank in October 2010 initially offered some hope.
What followed was relegation out of the Football League, and Brush cannot be separated from that simply because Tilson was the man in the manager’s chair. He was part of the management team entrusted with our survival, part of the decision-making and part of a collapse that left this club facing years of non-league football. Whatever they had achieved together elsewhere, their Lincoln legacy was an appalling failure at the moment we needed leadership most.
For me, the lingering frustration is that they never seemed fully committed to Lincoln. I never felt they embraced the club or understood what it meant to the people who would still be here dealing with the consequences long after they had gone. Both were sacked in October 2011, but there was no quick escape from the damage, and Brush’s role in taking us out of the league comfortably earns him this place.
The Ugly: Billy Knott
Billy Knott’s connection to West Ham came in their youth system, before spells with Chelsea and Sunderland gave him a pedigree that made his arrival at Lincoln particularly intriguing. When he joined on loan from Gillingham in 2017, there were glimpses of a footballer who could see passes others couldn’t, with the technique to deliver them. His winner against Bromley began the seven-match winning run that carried us to the National League title, and he played a part in every game of that sequence.
Making the move permanent felt like good business, but the anticipated breakthrough never came. Often used away from his preferred number ten position, he finally got an opportunity there against Notts County, only for a red card to bring it to an abrupt end. That afternoon felt pivotal: his chances dwindled, he eventually went on loan to Rochdale, and the player we had hoped would flourish in League Two slipped away from us.
The ugly part is how that promise unravelled, and how easy it was to judge him without understanding what was happening beyond the pitch. When Billy spoke publicly in 2018 about his struggles with depression and alcohol, it changed how I viewed those final months, including criticism I had directed towards him. We had seen a gifted footballer failing to make the impact we expected, but his honesty reminded us there was a person behind those performances, and I look back on his spell with far more sadness than anger.
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