Proud After a 6-0 Lincoln City Defeat? You’re Damn Right I Am

Somehow, though, what happened last night created a moment that made me so proud to be a Lincoln City supporter that I almost feel the defeat was worth it just to witness it. Of course, beating West Ham would have been better, and taking something from the game would have been fantastic, but I’ve woken up this morning with a completely different feeling to the one I expected.

I’ve just witnessed the heaviest home defeat, in terms of margin, that I’ve ever had the unfortunate pleasure of watching. Yet, I’m not thinking about the six goals, the points we’ve lost or even the two dismissals that effectively ended the contest before it had properly begun.

I’m not even particularly angry with Tom Hamer and Conor McGrandles anymore. I can see how both red cards came about, and while the decision-making was poor, some of the suggestions that they’re brainless or should never play for Lincoln City again are ridiculous takes. Absolutely ridiculous, and I’ll come back to why a little later.

All of that has been overshadowed by those outrageous final ten minutes in the stands. For me, Lincoln City 0 West Ham United 6 will never really be about the football, but about a set of supporters, led by the excellent 617, underlining their credentials as the best fans in the division.

I know there will be counterarguments, because there always are. People will say it wouldn’t happen every week, that we wouldn’t have reacted like that if we’d lost 3-0 at home to Sheffield United with eleven men, or that it’s easy to put on a show when the television cameras are there. I’m not going to get dragged into any of that, because I genuinely believe we witnessed something special.

In fact, I think we had a moment every bit as big as the Portsmouth moment, and Lincoln City fans will know exactly what I mean when I say that.

Cast your minds back to the final day of the 2023/24 season, when Portsmouth came to Sincil Bank, and we had somehow dragged ourselves into the play-off places. We’d been miles off the pace earlier in the season, something like ten or twelve points adrift at one stage, but an incredible run had put us in a position where we started that final afternoon in the top six.

Daniel Mandroiu missed a penalty, Portsmouth eventually took the lead, and then Paddy Lane scored their second deep into injury time. That was it, our play-off dream was over, but rather than anger and frustration, the reaction from the Lincoln supporters was extraordinary.

People were on their feet, applauding and singing, recognising the mammoth effort that those players had put in to get us into that position. I remember coming away from Sincil Bank that afternoon thinking, my Lord, that was unbelievable, and feeling an immense sense of pride despite the disappointment.

It’s easy to lose sight of what our supporters are really like when you’re exposed to social media every day. There’s so much shit, negativity and moaning, and people dressing up their constant criticism as simply asking questions or refusing to look on the bright side. After almost every defeat, there’s a dissection of why this player isn’t good enough, why that player shouldn’t be in the team and why everything apparently needs changing.

It can create a completely false impression of the fanbase, and sometimes it’s easy to get sucked into that yourself. We’ve also had moments that reflect badly on us, such as the homophobic chanting against Chelsea or the sectarian abuse directed at James McClean, but those incidents involve a minority of people whose behaviour tarnishes everybody else.

Last night reminded me what the overwhelming majority of Lincoln City supporters are really about. They stood behind their team in circumstances where they could quite easily have turned against them, and when things reached the point where there was absolutely nothing left to play for, they produced something I’ll remember for years.

Let’s be fair, when you’re two men down after 23 minutes against a side that probably shouldn’t have been relegated from the Premier League, you’re entitled to be a little pragmatic about what follows. Tom Hamer’s dismissal after three minutes and Conor McGrandles’ red card twenty minutes later left nine Lincoln players trying to contain a team containing Jarrod Bowen, Arne Engels and a host of other players operating at a completely different financial level.

West Ham eventually scored six, with Konstantinos Mavropanos breaking the deadlock just before half-time and the visitors adding five more after the break. There isn’t much meaningful football analysis to be done once a contest has been reduced to that kind of mismatch, but what happened towards the end was absolutely extraordinary.

At 5-0, the chanting started to take on a life of its own. West Ham supporters were singing about being champions of Europe, and Lincoln City supporters responded with ‘Champions of League One, you’ll never sing that’, which is precisely the sort of ridiculous football humour that I love.

The West Ham fans seemed to appreciate it, and why wouldn’t they? They were watching their side win 5-0 away from home, but at the other end Lincoln supporters were almost celebrating what the club had become, regardless of what was happening on the pitch.

Then the sixth goal went in, and I genuinely couldn’t hear the West Ham fans celebrating because Lincoln supporters were singing about conquering League One. Imagine that for a moment, you’re watching your side concede a sixth goal at home, having played almost the entire evening with fewer players than the opposition, and you’re singing about what you’ve achieved.

It wasn’t just a handful of people, either. From my position I can’t see upper block seven because the gantry gets in the way, but I could see lower seven and lower six, and there were entire sections of supporters jumping up and down as though we’d just won the league.

At 5-0 and then 6-0, people were bouncing around celebrating Lincoln City. Not the performance, not the result, but the football club itself, what it means to them and what we’ve all experienced together over the last few years.

Huge respect to every single person involved.

The final whistle went, and we’d lost 6-0 at home after having two players sent off in the opening 23 minutes. I didn’t hear a single boo, not one, although perhaps that’s because most of those who might have been inclined to boo had already packed up and gone home.

I saw a couple of people leaving after the third goal, a few more after the fourth and fifth, but there were still plenty inside Sincil Bank when the sixth went in. Those who stayed created an atmosphere that made the scoreline feel almost irrelevant, and that takes some doing when you’ve just been absolutely pumped.

I also want to give credit to the West Ham supporters, because I thought they were excellent. They came, they sang about blowing bubbles, they enjoyed their evening and, from what I could hear, they didn’t really feel the need to take the piss out of us.

There was no great chorus of ‘We can see you sneaking out’ or ‘Is there a fire drill?’ when people started leaving. Their songs were largely about themselves rather than mocking Lincoln, and perhaps they recognised that once we’d gone down to nine men, there was no longer a proper contest to be had.

They were winning comfortably, and we were celebrating our football club. In a strange way, it created an atmosphere where both sets of supporters could enjoy their evening (retrospectively for me) for completely different reasons, which is something I don’t think I’ve experienced very often.

And let’s not forget the scale of the challenge. I wouldn’t be surprised if the nine Lincoln players left on the field collectively earned something approaching what Jarrod Bowen takes home in a week, so when you consider the gulf between the two clubs, the reaction from our supporters becomes even more understandable.

However, I wonder if there was something else happening last night, something that might only become apparent over the next few weeks.

After Sheffield United, I wondered whether that result might prove to be a catalyst for change. Tom Shaw and Chris Cohen have been gradually integrating new players, bringing in the likes of Callum Elder, Yunus Konak, Daniel Oyegoke and Chiedozie Ogbene, while Andrei Coubiș is another player who will surely have a part to play as the season develops.

We’ve talked a lot about the new signings and the need to evolve, but we’ve also continued to rely heavily on the players who delivered that remarkable 103-point season. That’s understandable, because those players earned their opportunity to represent Lincoln City in the Championship, and you don’t simply discard the men who have given you the greatest league season in the club’s history.

But I do wonder whether last night might have been the moment we finally closed the gate on League One.

Bear with me, because I know how strange that sounds after a 6-0 defeat, but think about how we approached the West Ham game. For all the talk of competing at Championship level, there was a feeling around Sincil Bank that this was a cup tie, rather than just another league fixture.

The cameras were in town, I was doing live television with Calendar, and there was that sense of occasion that I used to associate with Chelsea, West Ham in the League Cup and all those other big matches we’ve had in recent years. I heard people walking down to the ground who were attending their first game of the season, talking about how well we’d done last year and how exciting it was to be back for this one.

It had that cup-tie feel, and perhaps that’s because we’re still getting used to the idea that we’re actually competing at this level. We were talking about previous meetings with West Ham, comparing it with Chelsea and treating it as one of those huge occasions that would once have been an extraordinary break from the normal routine.

But this is our normal routine now, or at least it’s what we’re trying to establish. We’re in the same division as West Ham United, Sheffield United, Southampton and the rest, and we’ve earned the right to be there rather than winning a cup draw that gives us a brief glimpse of another world.

Perhaps, then, the 103 points have become something of a millstone around our necks. Not because there’s anything wrong with celebrating them, but because the achievement was so enormous that we’ve almost struggled to leave it behind.

The players who delivered that title are immortals as far as I’m concerned. In ten years’ time, nobody will be sitting around talking about Tom Hamer getting sent off against West Ham or Conor McGrandles pulling back Jarrod Bowen. They’ll be talking about those two players helping Lincoln City achieve something that nobody in our history had ever managed before.

That’s an absolute rock-solid fact in my mind, and one terrible night doesn’t change it. However, football has to move forward, and perhaps the very success that elevated those players into club legends has made it harder for us to accept that evolution is necessary.

We’ve been here before, albeit on a smaller scale.

Think back to the end of 2023/24, when Michael Skubala’s side went on that extraordinary run towards the play-offs. We played with a back three, Joe Taylor became almost mythical for his contributions, and everything about the way we finished that season suggested we’d found a formula that could carry us forward.

The problem was that the following season, it became increasingly apparent that we weren’t necessarily suited to playing that way anymore. Yet, changing from the system that had taken us so close to the play-offs was difficult, because everybody could point back to that run as evidence that it worked.

Eventually, we moved away from it against Crawley Town in March 2025 and began to develop something different, and the result was a record-breaking League One title. It required us to stop looking backwards at what might have been in April 2024 and start thinking about what could happen next.

I wonder if we’re at a similar point now. Maybe the incredible success of last season has left us clinging to a particular group of players and a particular way of doing things, when the Championship is demanding something different.

That doesn’t mean the title winners aren’t good enough, or that we need wholesale changes, because we’ve already seen enough this season to know we can compete. We’ve won away at Preston and Bristol City, we’ve taken points from established Championship clubs, and we’ve shown there’s plenty to work with.

But perhaps last night was the final celebration of what we achieved last season, the post-party, if you like, before we finally start treating this as a completely new challenge.

And that brings me, rather bizarrely, to Siena. Yeah, the city in Tuscany.

Bear with me on this one, because I promise there’s a point to it. In Siena, they have a famous horse race called the Palio di Siena, a bareback race around the Piazza del Campo in the centre of the city, traditionally held in July and August. The race itself is an extraordinary spectacle, but the celebrations don’t finish when the horses cross the line. The winning district continues celebrating for weeks afterwards, with processions, ceremonies and parties that keep the memory of that victory alive long after the actual competition has finished.

I was lucky enough to visit Siena in 2005, and I remember going out for a late drink one evening, long after the Palio itself had taken place. It was approaching midnight, and suddenly there was this procession, with people celebrating and the atmosphere of the race coming alive all over again.

The main event had been and gone, the winner had already been crowned, but they were still reliving it. It was almost a final swansong, one last celebration before everybody returned to normal life.

I wonder if that’s what last night was for Lincoln City.

Maybe winning League One with 103 points was our Palio, the great event that we’ll remember for the rest of our lives. Maybe those extraordinary final ten minutes against West Ham were our final little trot around the square, celebrating something we’d already won, even as we were being beaten 6-0.

There’s something quite poetic about that, I think. The title winners, the players who gave us the greatest league campaign in our history, were being absolutely battered by one of the biggest clubs in the Championship, and the supporters were still celebrating them.

Now two of those players, Hamer and McGrandles, will be suspended, and that creates opportunities for others to come into the side. There were players who emerged from last night with credit, players who showed they could stand up to an almost impossible task, and perhaps the changes forced upon us will help shape the next stage of our development.

I’m not suggesting for a moment that either red card was acceptable, or that losing 6-0 is some kind of tactical masterstroke. We were badly let down by two decisions that should never have been made, and there are consequences for those decisions, but I refuse to allow them to wipe away everything those players have done for this football club.

What I saw last night was bigger than the result, and I think it might ultimately prove to be bigger than the performance. I saw supporters recognising where we’ve come from, celebrating what we’ve achieved and perhaps, without even realising it, saying goodbye to the League One chapter.

We’ve conquered all of League One, and we certainly did, but now it’s time to move forward.

We go to Millwall next, potentially with some new faces in the side, and we have to start looking at the Championship as the competition we’re part of rather than some extraordinary adventure we’re lucky to be experiencing. With the level of support we witnessed last night, or even half of it, we stand every chance of going there and picking something up.

Last night was a 6-0 defeat, but I genuinely believe I’ll remember it as one of my proudest moments supporting Lincoln City. Maybe that’s ridiculous, maybe it makes no sense to anybody who wasn’t there, but sometimes football isn’t about what happens on the pitch.

Sometimes it’s about everything that has happened to bring you to that moment, and everything you hope is still to come.