First Impressions – not to be trusted we hope.

I went along to Sincil Bank last Tuesday for what I have to confess was my first view of Gary Simpson’s new improved City. You couldn’t in all honesty describe it as easy on the eye. Critics of the previous regime will argue with justification that it’s no use playing pretty football if the team is going to lose though.


For me the problem with the Holdsworth style of play was the defenders were trying to play their way out from the back often with disastrous results. If you watch Premier League football on the telly even they don’t do that as a matter of course. There’s a time and place for the good old hoof and maybe if Holdsworths Imps had done that a bit more points might not have been surrendered with such regularity.

It’s Simpsons Imps however and we are entering a new era. It’s far too early to judge whether that is ultimately going to bear fruit or whether we are to remain in this present trough or even worse. Having said it’s too early to judge I’m going to jump in with both feet and confess I found Tuesdays spectacle nothing better than awful quite frankly. Talk about all hell and no notion, the ball was pinged about like a bagatelle machine. Our goal was an oggie, Wrexham’s were defensive catastrophes. Farman, on a night when he performed heroics in many ways left wearing, appropriately enough for an article written today, the red nose.

Talking of disasters I don’t think I can remember a first team home game played in front of such a sparse audience. They did admittedly make a fine job of getting behind the team and creating a good atmosphere, often the case when the crowd is down to the most diehard of fans but the honeymoon, such as it was seems to be over before it started for Simpson with many of the watchers complaining about the removal of the industrious Jones to be replaced by most fans favourite whipping boy Smith. A cantankerous sounding Simpson afterwards on the radio maintaining that Jones was not doing the business as far as he was concerned in contrast to Smith who got some good crosses in. I must have missed them.

So the honeymoon turned out not to be a fortnight in the Caribbean but a wet weekend in Cleethorpes, the brides dress appearing to be so thin that onlookers were treated to a first class view of her spindly legs, garter round her ankle. Welcome to the world of supporting Lincoln City at the moment.