When people asked me which ground I most wanted to see Lincoln City visit in the Championship, I kept coming back to Loftus Road.
I think a few people expected me to say Middlesbrough, West Ham or Wolves. There were three grounds that jumped out at me, though. Loftus Road was top, with Vicarage Road and Carrow Road behind it, and to explain why, I probably have to go back to my Panini sticker albums.
I had a thing for teams that wore yellow, once upon a time. Norwich City had the yellow and green, Watford the yellow and red, and both stood out when you flicked through the album. We played Mansfield and Oxford; I don’t care for those teams, although I do remember seeing Oxford in there one year. Norwich and Watford were the ones whose colours lodged themselves in my head before I had any real reason to think about either club.
QPR had that with the blue and white hoops. Even the name had something about it. You had page after page of clubs named after towns and cities, and then there was QPR, three letters that told you exactly who you were looking at. I think of Gary Bannister, Danny Maddix and Alan McDonald, and a bit later Trevor Sinclair and Devon White. Those are names that take me straight back to a certain era of English football. Funny how it works, too. Bannister ended up playing for us, and White had already been an Imp by the time he wore those hoops.
My first season watching Lincoln was 1986/87, and we played Wolves, Burnley, Swansea and Cardiff in the league, so there was no allure when I saw them on the fixture list. I’ve seen us play at Crystal Palace in the cup, but if they were Championship and we hadn’t played them in the past, they’d likely drop into the conversation. It’s teams we haven’t played that interested me the most, and those at the level in between massive clubs and us. QPR felt like a big club when I was a kid, big enough to be in the sticker album every year, just far enough away from where Lincoln were that I could never imagine us playing them in the league.
There’s something about those London clubs in particular, those which remain more community and local than Premier League monsters detached from reality. However, we’ve played Charlton in the cup and the league, and Leyton Orient have been familiar opponents over the years. Brentford might have had the same pull for me if they were still at Griffin Park, but they’re not. In all the time I’ve followed City, QPR have never come up. The last competitive meeting was a League Cup tie at Loftus Road in 1971, 15 years before I started watching us.
The ground is a big part of my desire to see the game in person. Carrow Road, Vicarage Road and Loftus Road are still where they were when I was collecting those stickers. They’ve all been built up and altered over the years, but they’ve grown in the same bit of town, evolved as part of the community, but not moved away from it.
People talk about Anfield and Old Trafford as great monuments to English football, and I can see why. I also think the Premier League has bastardised much of what made those places special, and I feel far more drawn to a ground like Loftus Road. To me, Loftus Road still belongs to Shepherd’s Bush in the way Sincil Bank belongs to Lincoln.
QPR have had their years of billionaire owners and Premier League football, and here we are in the same league talking about what a blow it is for them to lose Alfie Lloyd, who was on the fringes of our side on loan last season. There’s something about that which makes me smile. I’d spent all those years putting QPR somewhere a bit above us in my head, and now we’ve got opinions on the same centre-forward.
Vicarage Road lived up to what I’d hoped it would be, even if the game didn’t go our way. The Graham Taylor connection gives that trip a meaning of its own, and to get Watford and QPR away in the same week is a proper treat. Loftus Road has always had the edge for me, though.
When I get in there on Saturday and see Lincoln City walk out to play QPR in a league game, I reckon a little bit of me will still be that kid with the sticker album open.
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