Wycombe Wanderers boss Michael Duff has been talking up City ahead of our trip to Adams Park on Saturday, describing the Imps as a side who will be “up and around the play offs” come the end of the season.
His words recognise what supporters have seen all autumn: this group has put itself right in the mix and refuses to step aside for anyone.
We head to Buckinghamshire joint top of the table, second only on goals scored, and doing it in a way that has become very familiar. City have taken only two wins from the last five league games, although that run contains a couple of setbacks that never felt terminal.
Duff’s respect for City was plain in his pre match briefing.
“They have started well and continued that, and if we are not at it, it will be a difficult afternoon. They are a physical team and there is an organisation in what they do. It is well documented that they are very good at set pieces and score a lot of goals from restarts”.
Since earning promotion back to the Football League in 2017, City have played Wycombe eleven times across both League Two and League One, winning twice. Our record at Adams Park is patchy. We have four wins in the entire history of the fixture away from home and only two in the last decade. The most recent was the 2-0 win in April 2024, remembered for Lasse’s outrageous fifty yard strike. That remains one of the best away goals we have seen in years and a reminder that City tend to find something unusual in this fixture when momentum is on our side.
The style debate cropped up again when Duff was asked about our rise to second despite sitting bottom of the possession table with just over 41% of the ball. His argument was simple and did not contradict anything we have been saying for months.
“If that is what you are good at, keep doing it. I played in a team at Burnley that was very successful and sometimes people turned their noses up at how we played, but we kept getting promotions. There is a snobbery in football. Lincoln are organised and have a structure in what they are doing and they have good players too.”
He closed his preview by focusing on the fine margins that define League One this season.
“There is not a lot between top and bottom, so all I can ask is for the players to put in a performance. Ideally, we roll it around and play great football, but if it is ugly and it has to go in off someone’s backside, I would take that. Whatever the game looks like, we need to turn up and battl”.
For City, this weekend is another test of whether we can keep riding the wave that has carried us through the autumn. Wycombe have form, they have injuries clearing, and they have confidence at home. Yet the Imps travel south believing that structure and resilience, the very qualities Duff highlighted, are exactly what can keep us in the hunt at the very top.