Onwards and upwards.

I’m not even going to try to do some kind of warm up for tonight but I just thought I’d share a couple of things I read recently, some ideas I’d thought of myself and which have been aired on the net.

The first is a quote from an article in The Daily Telegraph and it’s from Danny Cowley:-

“I’m from Essex, my knowledge of local geography here wasn’t great,” he says. “When I first came, I’d be saying, 'How long’s it take to get to so-and-so?’ And it was always two hours. Everywhere is two hours from here. The consequence of being exactly in the middle of nowhere is that we can create a real strong allegiance with the club. There’s 100,000 people in this city. In our own small way, this is a sleeping giant. We’re beginning to wake it up. Now let’s tickle its belly.”

Just stick with me, the other thought was in an article, a tribute really to Graham Taylor and it referred to meetings that took place whilst Taylor was manager at Lincoln with, amongst others the Cobbold brothers who were so instrumental in Ipswich Town raising their own profile and eventually winning the First Division title and the FA Cup and indeed the EUFA Cup. Taylor thought he could do the same with Lincoln City.

When we were in Ipswich for the match we stayed over and had a look round the town on the Sunday. It’s an unremarkable place and not big at all. Yet there we all were in a 30000 seat stadium. Where do all those fans come from?

Coming back to Danny Cowleys point in actual fact the population of the built up area of Lincoln and surroundings is something like 130,000. What’s the population of Ipswich? 130,000.

What Ipswich have and Norwich too for that matter, which also isn’t particularly big, is an affinity with their counties that causes football fans of whatever allegiance to look to them as their club. Could Lincoln City do the same, just as Graham Taylor imagined all those years ago?

Maybe I’m getting the cart before the horse here and of course Ipswich Town did have the Cobbold brothers, Norwich have Delia but success breeds success and you never know if another Clive Nates or two might be inspired to come on board the Lincoln Loco. We can but dream.

I’ll get back to sleep now.