Concentration is the key. Hope the players are doing that too.

About twenty years ago when I went to work in Boston I quickly became friends with a Boston United fan from work. After establishing he had one head, two arms and two legs (yes and the requisite numbers of fingers and toes, cheeky!) He was therefore quite safe to talk football with and, let’s face it, it’s far preferable to talk football, even with a Pilgrim than work.

Anyway, I remember saying, given that it was the time of Keith once I’d been there a while and the never-ending quest for promotion through the playoffs, that we just didn’t have unimportant games at Sincil Bank any more. My friend was sceptical but it was true and it’s true now so, as I sit at my keyboard on a Friday the tempting headline is, it’s now or never, or City in the biggest game of the season. That’s because every game is the biggest game of the season. In fact you could say the biggest game for twenty seasons.

Not that it’s going to be easy tomorrow. Macclesfield have their own pressing concerns and it’s to do with leaving league two, but for all the wrong reasons. Once again we have a celebrated former player in the away dugout. I said I admired Paul Scholes for going into management, not that it did him much good and I admire Sol Campbell for the same reason. Its not easy starting at a level he has little experience of and putting himself in the firing line of the comedians in the stands. Whether we’ll get much of that tomorrow I don’t know, Scholesy didn’t get a lot of grief and I suspect a lot of people, like me will rather admire him for starting at the bottom, with due respect to the non league scene.

What I don’t expect to see is a manager with his hood up and hands in pockets. Campbell knows he has a mighty job to do and if he fails at it, that’s the end of his management career and he’ll be banished to the lesser fringes of the punditry world like another failed manager I wouldn’t care to name.