Ten Of The All-Time Worst Refereeing Decisions To Go Against Lincoln City

4: Assistant Referee Guesses

Lincoln’s meeting with Wigan Athletic at Sincil Bank on 13 April 2024 came with our unlikely League One play-off push gathering momentum after 16 matches unbeaten. With the score at 1-1, Reeco Hackett appeared to have supplied exactly the goal we needed to keep that charge going.

Lasse Sorensen won possession high up the field and delivered a deep cross, Joe Taylor hooked it back across goal, and Hackett slammed it home. Up went the assistant’s flag: Taylor was judged to have taken the ball over the byline before pulling it back. The problem was that the official was around 40 yards away, looking across a crowded penalty area at an angle, rather than down the line he was being asked to judge.

Even slow-motion replays did not establish conclusively whether the whole ball had gone out, so the anger centred on how an assistant with that view could be certain enough to disallow it. Charlie Hughes subsequently scored Wigan’s late winner, leaving City with a 2-1 defeat and a major setback in the race for the top six.

That decision cost us three points. Had we gone 2-1 up, I firmly believe we’d have hung on to win against midtable Wigan. In the end, we finished two points outside of the play-offs, a direct example of one decision helping to define a season’s outcome.