City look a bit off the pace, but still win. It’s all coming back to me now.

 

I suppose if there are any advantages to our present situation you could say at least we watched last nights win, or at least I did, in front of the fire nice and warm but certainly not comfortable. If someone on twitter perhaps, had said to me only bother with the last half hour it’d be just about perfect.

I’m not complaining, every fan watches his team grind out a win and will usually say, well that’s the mark of a good team, play badly and win. Of course City didn’t play badly. The passing was maybe a bit wayward and quality was at a premium but the effort was there, the skill, a bit elusive possibly but in evidence and in the end Wigan were upskittled by a piece (should say another piece really) of Jorge Grant excellence. After the equaliser there was only one team in it. In fact, looking at it in the cold light of day there always was only one team in it although during the game I for one, was far from certain about that.

For me there were three real plus points about last night. City came from behind to defeat a team bottom of the league, that’s not always been our forte even with a good side. Two players in particular did the business, Jorge Grant and Tom Hopper. The latter maybe quietened his detractors a little bit, I’m not sure what some people thought they were getting when we paid a few quid for Hopper, Alan Shearer perhaps? The third plus for me was the use of the substitutes bench underlining, and I don’t think there are many fans left who need this pointing out, what a good manager we have.

It was always going to be the case that the bandwagon that was the Lincoln Ferrari was going to need to come into the pits for some new tyres at some point but last night reminded me of those glorious years of the Cowley era, those comebacks, the last minute winners, getting outplayed by some teams that thought they only had to turn up to take the points and still winning, beating those guardians of the spirit of football who huffed and puffed but couldn’t blow our house down.

Of course virtually no one is outplaying us now and our style is as good as anyone’s, it must be, Mark Cooper said so, and if we have difficulties with teams it’s usually because they pay us the compliment of raising their game against us.

 I’m still amazed that we seem to be able to overcome most opponents and we sit second in League One and I’ve done my Christmas shopping. I’ll repeat that in case anyone at the back didn’t hear. Second in League One!