Danny Cowley believes Lincoln City might never have reached the Championship without the FA Cup run that took us to the quarter-finals in 2017.
Speaking to the Colchester Gazette ahead of Saturday’s first-round tie against Worcester City, Cowley revealed that he and his brother Nicky had shown their squad footage of Sean Raggett’s winner at Burnley.
The man in the clip is now a teammate of the Colchester players, as Raggett joined the U’s in July after also playing for the Cowleys at Portsmouth.
“I look at Lincoln City now in the Championship and I’m not sure that would have been possible if we hadn’t had the FA Cup run that we had,” Danny said.
As we know, Arsenal ended the run at the Emirates, but some of what we earned along the way went into the £1.3m EPC, now a key part of us attracting players and building for the future. Danny recalled that the Imps had been training at army barracks in the National League, something I witnesses firsthand, and said the club’s decision to put the money into a permanent base was still paying off.
“It’s such a well-run club and off the money that we made from the cup run, they intelligently invested it into a training ground.
“At the time, we were just training at army barracks as a National League team, so we bought a piece of land and built a training ground.
“They’ve developed and developed and developed on that land and now have a brilliant training ground.
“I know that’s played a big part in helping the club get to where they are, in the Championship today.”
The header Cowley showed his Colchester players
There were 81 league places between Burnley and Lincoln when we went to Turf Moor for the fifth round in February 2017. Inside five minutes, Nathan Arnold cut the ball back for Jack Muldoon, who fired over from close range. Paul Farman kept us level as Burnley pressed in the second half.
Then, in the 89th minute, Sam Habergham sent a corner deep to Luke Waterfall, who headed it back across goal for Raggett to nod over the line. The goal made us the first non-league side to reach the last eight since 1914, and the man who scored it was already thinking about the next league game when he spoke to the FA.
“We won’t be celebrating,” he said. “We have North Ferriby away in the league on Tuesday!”
Indeed we did: it’s rumoured Arsenal scouts couldn’t get tickets as Lincoln fans flooded the ground on the Banks of the Humber to see us win 1-0 again, this time courtesy of Waterall.
It’s almost ten years since that great day, and this weekend the Cowleys will be in the dugout of the League Two side. Worcester will be hoping to give them a reminder of how it feels when the team from further down the pyramid gets through.
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