Lincoln 2-1 Southend – March 12th 2011

Football is a game of highs and lows and, oddly, sometimes the most memorable highs come at low times and vice versa. Case point; losing 3-0 to Colchester on the final day of last season. The ultimate high, winning the league, offset by a crushing 3-0 defeat that some wouldn’t stay until the end of.

My first high of the decade was the start of something, just not quite what I expected. As we beat Southend 2-1 at the Bank in March 2011, it was our eighth win in 14 games. The lineup wasn’t classic (Carson, Watts, Hone, Kelly, Hunt, Carayol, O’Keefe, Clapham, Facey Hutchinson, Grimes) but it did feel like the start of our renaissance. This was Tilson’s Southend, a club he’s inextricably linked with to this very day. Still, we had the ‘Tilson is an Imp’ banner and an Ashley Grimes double either side of Blair Sturrock’s consolation gave us the win that we all felt made us safe.

I left that day overjoyed; the horror of Sutton seemed to have faded and the Imps were on their way back. We had a decent manager (so I thought) and only needed a win in the last 11 games or so to be safe. This was where everything started and I remember celebrating hard that night, even after Scott Spencer’s late horror miss.

Oh, how wrong we were.