Lincoln City Against West Ham: The Contest We Never Got To See

West Ham had come with defenders who looked ready for the battle. They knew what they were going to get, and I was interested to see whether we could cause them problems anyway. Even with ten, there were enough little signs to keep me invested in the contest. Then came Conor’s red card, and the particularly frustrating thing is that it came from our attack. Daniel Oyegoke, who I thought had a very good game, hooked the ball back to him. It’s not an easy ball to deal with, and it looked to me as though Conor was trying to get it back to George Wickens, but he got it horribly wrong, and suddenly Bowen was going through.

The pull back that followed was another clear red card. Bowen was heading towards a one-on-one, Conor stopped him, and there wasn’t any ambiguity about the goalscoring opportunity he’d denied. After 23 minutes, we had eight outfield players left to face arguably the most star-studded side I’ve seen line up against Lincoln in a league fixture.

I love Conor, and I don’t need reminding of what he’s contributed to this football club. The frustration is that losing possession and then pulling someone back has become a pattern, and tonight it happened in the worst possible circumstances. With one player already gone, that mistake and the reaction to it absolutely killed us. Would I have preferred to go 1-0 down with ten men? Maybe, but then you’re saying ‘take the foul, and it’s still 0-0’. The key is not giving the ball to an England international.

Even then, I didn’t think we were doing that badly as we approached half-time. There was something of Sheffield United about it, in the sense that we were getting towards the break having competed, only to concede just before it. Konstantinos Mavropanos heading in from a corner was a horrible way to finish a half in which the remaining players had worked so hard.

However, as soon as it becomes nine against eleven, all conventional analysis goes out of the window. People can say it’s another set piece, another goal conceded at that point in a game, or another example of something we need to improve. I can’t look at it in the same way when we’re trying to defend with two fewer players against that opposition.

If I started picking apart our shape, our attacking output or individual defensive decisions from the 23rd minute onwards as though this were a normal game, I’d be doing those on the field a disservice. The entire context had changed. We were watching our team try to survive, knowing they were going to be pushed back, punished and eventually exhausted.

With ten, perhaps we continue to frustrate West Ham. Perhaps that corner is defended differently, or perhaps we’re able to get further up the pitch and it never happens in the first place. I don’t know, but that’s the point: you can’t take the goals from a game played with nine men and assume the same things happen with ten.

I remember us going down to nine at Swindon when Bruno Andrade and Jason Shackell were sent off. We had a 2-0 lead and ended up drawing 2-2, which was a reminder of how difficult it is to hold out when you’re two players short. That was against another League Two side, with a lead already established.

Here, we were underdogs before a ball had been kicked. We were facing a team with a level of quality that would have made eleven against eleven difficult enough, and we had to spend most of the evening trying to bridge that gap with nine. It was never realistically going to finish 0-0.

West Ham scored five in the second half, and we barely got out. There were almost moments, little situations where we looked as though we might create something, but nothing that could change the direction of the game. There were brave performances across the pitch, but bravery was never going to make that a fair contest. It was like someone cutting the back leg off my dog and then setting six of their own on it and being proud of how he fought back. It was, frankly, horrible to watch for two reasons: I was scared it might get to ten, and I know we’d have given them a tough game on equal footing.

People will discuss substitutions, who should have come on and who stayed on too long, but I can’t get particularly worked up about any of that. The decisive events had already happened. There wasn’t a change available on the bench that could give us back the two players we’d lost.

I’m still not sure which dismissal frustrates me more. Tom’s is a tackle he doesn’t need to make, so early in the game and in a position where there is no need to take that risk, but there is an obvious motivation behind it: let him know he’s in a game. Conor’s is the continuation of something we’ve already seen: losing possession and recovering unfairly, at the precise moment when we needed to be especially careful.

There is room to recognise everything those two have done for us and still be angry about tonight. There is also room to feel desperately sorry for the players left out there, who had to spend the rest of the evening dealing with the consequences. They kept going, and I understood why supporters applauded them at the end.

I’ve been critical of referees this season, and Kitchen did very little elsewhere to improve my opinion of him. Getting two clear red cards right doesn’t mean every other decision is beyond criticism. That failure to allow the advantage denied us a genuine opportunity while there was still something left of the contest. I also think there’s a foul on Wickens for the sixth goal. Having watched it back, I think he’s fouled by Castellanos as he claims the ball, and I don’t think the goal should stand. Five would just have felt a little more respectable.

The advantage is the decision that bothers me more because it came while we could still influence the game. The sixth goal merely added another layer to an evening which had already gone badly wrong. Neither decision, though, takes responsibility away from the two players whose dismissals put us in that position.

To end, I do hope that those initial reactions, mine included, do not turn supporters against two fine players from last season. Hamer and McGrandles have been superb for us over their time at Lincoln, and they cost us one set of three points and a bit of goal difference. Yes, they did wrong, and yes, they’ll be hurting just like we are, but I confess even my initial reaction feels like it was knee-jerk in the moment. It was disappointment that the second ‘big day’ at the Bank (after Pompey) has ended in a defeat, and one which I think might not have been so cut and dried had we gone toe-to-toe, 11v11.

Ultimately, I wanted to come away from the game knowing a bit more about how we measure up against a side like West Ham. Instead, we’ve got a 6-0 defeat, two entirely avoidable red cards and a group of players who spent most of the evening being battered like a Scottish Mars Bar for mistakes they hadn’t made.