Once more unto the breach dear friends, once more.

Here we are then, another season starts and we emerge from the pre season shenanigans into the real world of league one. Results from the friendlies were mixed, shall we say but that’s all irrelevant, the real action starts now, with Accrington Stanley and where better to start?

Accrington were a league club and to all intents and purposes disappeared, or did they? Despite a lack of real support from the terraces and with one of the best managers in the lower leagues (do we say lower leagues now?) and with the benefit of a proper character in the shape of their chairman, Andy Holt, they continue to defy gravity and now contemplate their second season in league one as we contemplate our first.

There has been much talk that many of our supporters have no experience of City’s occupation of a league position any higher than the bottom rung of the league ladder and yet, when I was a much younger fan, there was a period, starting with the great Graham Taylor team, 1975/76, when of a period of ten seasons, City occupied league one level as it is now called for eight of them. I genuinely believed City had made the leap to a higher level. Of course, this being the Imps, they hadn’t.

The last time City started a season at the level we are now at the euphoria didn’t last till the end of it, City were relegated at the first attempt. It seems like only yesterday to an old fogey like me but in fact it was over twenty years ago. Most of us know what happened after that.

Sometimes, like most people I suppose I daydream about a wonderful thing happening, a big lottery win perhaps, something life changing. Strange I should muse on that as I don’t buy a ticket but, no matter, sometimes you have these thoughts but then you think, hang on, something good has happened just not in the way imagined and so it is with City. Something wonderful is happening, but it isn’t a huge event, like a billionaire taking over and getting us in the premier league, nevertheless a revolution is taking place before our very eyes and, unlike our billionaire, it’s unlikely that it will be snatched away from us. We will certainly lose the Cowleys one day, we may lose Clive Nates but we’re unlikely to lose the whole lot when someones interest wanes or progress slows or stops altogether.

So we contemplate life in league one, not in terms of a one season wonder, enjoyable as it was but as equals despite the increasing disparity of means as we climb the ladder. What we lack in one area we make up for in others. I hope I’m not being unrealistic but, as we look forward to the season I can’t help feeling that the next move for the Imps will not be back from whence we came.