I usually break here for the second half, but I’ve broken for another incident which, for me at least, signalled the turning point of the game. After 40 minutes, Liam Bridcutt went off with a hamstring injury and looks like he might be out for another couple of games. Call me a defeatist, but as far as I see it, that could be the end of our top six dreams. If we lose our captain, as well as all the other players, how can we function? My Mazda might have got around that car park with four toy wheels on, but take the petrol tank out and it’s going nowhere.
That exasperated my anger and upset and I’m not sure I called the rest of the game clearly, I just sank deeper into wallowing self-pity. When Harry went through on their keeper and he was crudely taken out, I screamed for a red card. Okay, the keeper was the last man, but Harry was heading wide, should that matter? It is a deliberate attempt to stop a player with no thought of playing the ball. In fact, if it had been a defender, the keeper had been in the sticks and Harry had been straight at goal, the defender would have been the last man, so surely a keeper doing it with an unguarded goal behind him deserves a red? Scott Oldham doesn’t do reds, I praised him for that before the game, now I’ve got a picture of him on my dartboard because I don’t have anyone else to blame.
I didn’t like the tackle on Harry just before half time either, another nasty late one, an Achilles’ snapper if ever I saw one. Yeah, to the letter of the law it is yellow and only a fool would say it should be a red, but if you’re going to stop a player cynically just drag him back, don’t risk his safety with that sort of challenge. It looked snidey and a bit reckless. Maybe it was just me protecting my team in my mind, but those two incidents felt unsavoury.
After half time, our play fell apart and Oxford didn’t need to be decent, which is good because they weren’t. The referee continued in his inconsistent vein, booking Edun for the faintest of pull backs on their player, but then ignoring a worse infringement from Hanson on Harry, again, not long after. If one is a yellow ref, the other has to be, it shouldn’t matter if you have already booked the player. There was another blatant handball in a move by Sykes which was missed, but then Scully offended in the same way and it was caught. I’m not saying those incidents changed the game, but they just poured more sand into the side of my scales marked ‘injustice’.
Am I calling the game fairly? Maybe. Maybe I’m seeing it through the eyes of a hurt and disappointed child, the young lad who has seen his Dad dream of promotion for the last 40 years. My Dad rang me the other night, after one of the poorer defeats, and his voice was just so low and soft. ‘I guess I won’t see second-tier football again in my lifetime’ he said, and it really upset me. He went to his first game as a really young kid in the early 60s, once watching us in the Second Division. The fact my Dad, a 68-year-old (or 69, I’m not sure), sounded like an upset boy, got to me. They are the eyes I’m seeing this through, not the ones of a fan wanting to be critical. Criticism isn’t my go-to place when things fall apart. If things go bad in my life I don’t lash out at those around me, I look for blame. Last night I looked for blame in a yellow shirt, or through the man with a whistle in his hand, or Covid, or whatever. I just don’t want to blame the players and I won’t.
They were to blame for the goal though, and that is even more galling. We could have drawn that game 1-1, if we’d played our football in our way with concentration and application, we take a point. Instead, Lewis Montsma plays a suicide ball to McGrandles and rightly gets panned for it. McGrandles got let off the hook a bit for being outmuscled and Oxford score. 2-1, probably the right score on the balance of chances, but a smack in the chops, a kick in the crotch and a spit in the eye for good measure. I wanted to scream at Montsma, I wanted to call McGrandles, but actually, neither had a bad game. I know you lot will be pulling them down on the player rater, but not many of our players actually had bad games last night. They did what they could, but it’s square pegs in round holes, three trainer wheels on a four-wheeled car with a gaping hole in the exhaust and petrol tank. Were stuttering and I’m not going to start calling players under those circumstances.
That said, if Bridcutt is on the field, he makes that bad ball into a decent one and clears his lines. That’s what he does.
We had chances after the goal. Harry got in down the left but shot with his right and saw a save. James Jones had a good chance for a header which he just nodded up into the air too. I’m not sure what has happened with Jones, he was really good earlier in the season, but since his lay-off, with covid, he has been a shadow of the player he was. Are there effects of Long Covid there? I hope not, I hope it is just form and nothing else, but the drop off has been remarkable. He isn’t the only one, not by a long shot, and sadly because of the crippling circumstances we have to keep turning to players who are struggling.
The game just petered out after that. Oxford were happy to defend their lead, and rightly so. I saw some quality in them, but I can also see why they have been inconsistent this season. Sadly, my counterparts at Oxford won’t be writing positives about us, they’ll be asking how we got where we were, and if we’ll stay in the top six. Actually, I saw a lot of ‘experts’ on social media last night, podcasts and bloggers covering League One, all questioning our form, that sort of thing. Nobody seemed to mention the injury-ravaged squad as part of the reasoning, it is just a cursory glance at results and comments of ‘Lincoln have dropped off’.
Yeah, we have. We’ve dropped off for a reason and I’d ask you to take the time to acknowledge that. Same goes for our fans saying ‘injuries aside’ before saying it wasn’t good enough etc. No, it wasn’t good enough, but saying ‘injuries aside’ is like saying ‘putting asides you ran out of milk and eggs, your cake is a disaster’. Would it have been a disaster with full ingredients? No. Would we have lost last night’s game with Hopper, Grant, Walsh, Bridcutt (for 90 minutes), Johnson and Jackson in the side? I suspect not. So please, do not dismiss the situation around the club as ‘no excuse’, because it is a better one than blaming the referee, Michael Appleton or whatever else you hide behind when trying not to let the hurt and disappointment ruin your weekend.
As for me, my weekend is already ruined. I’ve watched another Lincoln performance that upsets me without anyone really to blame and that makes them all the harder to digest and process. Plus, I’ve got to go to Tesco in Cleethorpes now to choose new glasses, and if there’s one thing I hate almost as much as feeling desolate and empty about my brave football team, it is Cleethorpes.
BE KIND WITH YOUR RATINGS!
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