Glossop North End 3-2 (March 21st, 1896)

You have to go back a bit further to find another abandoned friendly, and usually, I might have stopped at 1900, but this one made me laugh. Our trip to Glossop ended on 80 minutes due to ‘crowd trouble’, but that doesn’t tell the full story; the crowd trouble was directed at the referee. Despite being a local man, he awarded the Imps (known then as the Cits) a goal, which resulted in Glossop players giving the referee some abuse. It seems said referee took exception to this and blew up ten minutes early, City effectively winning 3-2.

I do like the report of the day, which opened like this “The interest taken at Lincoln in the match City v Glossop was absolutely nil. Nobody cared one single jot which of the two teams won and therefore, I am happy, for there is no necessity for me to write much about it.”

Grimsby Town 2-2 (September 29th, 1892)

The last entry on our list feels like I’m writing about a fictional world! In September 1893, City played Grimsby at Mablethorpe to celebrate the opening of the Louth to Sutton-on-Sea railway line. The game wouldn’t finish. Why? Who knows? There’s no reference to it in either the Lincoln Chronicle or the Echo.

One That Never Went Ahead

Imps v Aston Villa (December 1991)

City were without a fixture for two Saturdays in a row in 1991. Stockport put us out of the FA Cup, but we followed that with big wins against Scunthorpe (4-2) and Doncaster Rovers (5-1). Sadly, we played Rovers on November 30th, and didn’t have another game scheduled in the league until December 17th. Our Assistant Manager at the time, Colin Clarke, knew Ron Atkinson, who agreed to bring Villa to the Bank for a friendly.

We’re talking Dwight Yorke, Cyrille Regis and Tony Daley, that sort of era. It would have been huge, putting bums on seats and giving us a chance to stay fit. Sadly, two days before it was due to be played, the game was called off because of frost. Attempts to arrange a game against Forest or Sheffield United two days later also fell foul of the weather, and when action resumed, we lost our form, winning two in 14.