12 Things Lincoln City Fans Will Never See At Sincil Bank Again

12. Knowing where the referee came from

You’d turn to the back of the programme and find the referee’s name with a place alongside it. Yate, Daventry, somewhere you’d vaguely heard of. Sometimes I wondered if they’d just made one up. Henry Cholmondley-Warner from Withstanshaw sounds entirely plausible until you ask me to point to Withstanshaw on a map.

In fact, I always take great pride in the referee from November 18th, the last game played before my birth, being Mr Hutchinson from Bourn, which is where my wife lived when I met her. You just can’t have coincidences like that anymore because referees don’t come from anywhere, apparently.

This is probably one element of the game we’ve lost for the best. I can’t remember whether the programme said George Cain was from Bootle when we played at Huddersfield in 2004, but after he gave that Pawel Abbott goal, there were some Lincoln fans published his address on an email mailing list. It would have taken a bit of effort then.

These days someone would have a search going before we’d even kicked off again, so probably best the referees don’t come from real places. I’d still advocate for them making up town names, though, such as Lewis Smith from Bell End, or James Bell from Sourthrow.