FAN’S VIEW 22/23 – NO.6: LINCOLN AT HOME

Poor start?

I don’t think any Oxford United supporter has been particularly inspired by our start to the season. It’s better defensively; pretty woeful attacking wise. Bang average at best entertainment wise save for a few inspired moments. Deserved to lose both away games. Only played well in the last quarter against Cambridge and got away with it in the last minute thanks to a brief moment of inspiration from a youngster who we know won’t do it every week let alone get the game time to do so.

Yes, the cup game brought joy, eventually, and gave hope but we’d been outplayed for lengthy spells and it’s all a bit different when it is not league points that are at stake.

Does this mean that there’s more pressure than there really should be at this very early stage? Quite possibly. Three points from a possible 12 and its doom and gloom. A win against the Imps and it is a 50% success rate, mid-table with an eye on top six.

Let’s be honest we have no idea which way it will go. One thing’s for sure though, if it is to go the way we want it to, a massive improvement is a must.

Our opponents

What’s the best way of looking at our opponents? Lincoln have not yet won a league game this season, fact. But, Lincoln have not yet lost a league game this season, fact. They’ve drawn both home games 1-1, against Exeter and Forest Green Rovers. In between they went to Fratton Park where it was goal-less.

After two and a half years in charge Michael Appleton left Lincoln in the summer by mutual consent to go and manage Championship side Blackpool.

A day after he’d signed to manage Lincoln he sat in the stand at Sincil Bank as we destroyed them 6-0. That was in September 2019. He then oversaw 24 games before the season was curtailed. His record wasn’t great. Seven wins, five draws and 12 defeats. They finished 16^th but the next season, 20/21, he got them to the play-off final where they lost to the team he now manages. I’ll quickly move on and not mention the team Blackpool beat at the semi-final stage.

Last season they dropped back to 17^th and it seems that the upward trajectory the club has been on since returning to the Football League may have peaked.

Their new manager Mark Kennedy was given a four year contract in May. He’s a highly regarded coach but has little previous managerial experience. His only previous time as a manager was at cash strapped Macclesfield Town in the covid affected 19/20 season when they were relegated from League 2.

I know virtually nothing about any Lincoln player other than one. That’s obviously Chris Maguire, signed on a two year deal by Appleton last summer. My guess would be that he’s on big money but further research shows that might not be the case. Not sure he’s in Kennedy’s plans though. He played in the EFL Cup but was an unused sub against FGR and has a combined total of 23 minutes in their other two league games. I always fear him though.

On the ownership front I can’t quite work out who’s pulling the strings. Perhaps it is all very democratic and LCFC are in a very good place.

Lincoln City Holdings Ltd owns 76.6% of the issued share capital of the Club. Sportvest Capital LLP owns 49.9% of Lincoln City Holdings Ltd. Sportvest Capital LLP is owned by three individuals – Clive Nates, Sean Melnick and Ashley Mendelowitz but I think others are involved as well. Lincoln City Suppporters’ Society also have a stake in the Holding company.

A perusal of their latest accounts to y/e 30/06/21 shows the following statements:

• Revenue in excess of £900k from digital sales limited the decline in match day income, which also benefited from Cup receipts of around £200k and the play-off pool of £100k.

{That seems a very high digital figure in those lockdown times. I’d be interested to know what ours was.}

• Player trading income was minimal and thus sharply down from the previous year, which saw the sale of Harry Toffolo. Although Jorge Grant was sold before the year-end, his contract permitted a sale to a Championship club for no upfront fee in the event of us remaining a League 1 club for the 2021/22 season.

{Toffolo having passed through Huddersfield is now in the Premier League with Forest and Grant, a Banbury lad, having moved to the Championship side Peterborough is now at Hearts in Scotland. Evidence that clubs of a certain size struggle to hold on to their better/sought after players and that our opponents may well be weaker now than they were two years ago. Quite a clever bit of negotiation of Grant’s terms of employment by his agent I’d say.}

• In a normal season, reaching a play-off final would have seen us netting around £500k. However, with restricted attendances and having to incur additional costs required to meet Covid protocols the cost of getting to the play-offs was some £100k. Reaching the play-offs also saw players trigger milestone bonuses and payments were also due to management and staff.

{Tough times indeed.}

• In order to fund the operating losses and capital expenditure, the company issued shares for cash amounting to £1.42million and received grant funding of £355k from The Football Foundation which contributed towards the construction of a new all-weather pitch at the LNER Stadium.

{For LNER (London North Eastern Railway) read Sincil Bank. That’s a good training facility to have right next to the pitch the first team plays on.}

• Directors and key investors contributed £1.28million for shares through Lincoln City Holdings with a further £139k gratefully received from fans. A further £900k, for investment into the club, remained in the Holdings bank account at the end of the financial year. We were delighted to welcome the Arizona based Jabara family as shareholders in Holdings with the family taking an initial 9% stake in June 2021. As part of this investment, we were also pleased to welcome Landon Donovan as a Strategic Advisor.

{Yes, that Landon Donavon.}

• Loss for the financial year, £1.4m
• Balance sheet, £1.8m
• Wages and salaries, £4.5m and with social security and pension costs added up to £5m

Salaries

Those figures seem rather low to me for a club with ambitions to get to the next level when compared to the big hitters.

I’ve no idea where the website salarysport.com gets its information from given that the salaries of footballers are supposed to be confidential and do not have to be disclosed individually in accounts but in the absence of anything else I’ll go with what they’ve come up with.

In 2022 player wages at Lincoln totalled £3.2m per year that’s approx. £61.3k per week. Ours was £4.3m and £80.4k respectively. On top of these figures not being verified it should also be remembered that clubs do not often pay the full salary of a loan player and it is that full salary that is listed here and that is also true when a player is only with a club for part of the season. Also I think they’ve missed one or two players out so all nonsense really but that isn’t going to stop me.

Our top two earners were Gavin Whyte (£426k) and Herbie Kane (£322k) both on loan and no longer here. Cameron Brannagan was our proper top earner on £229k and that was before his increase. James Henry was on £213k, Sam Winnall £187k and Jamie Hanson £161k. Not always got it right have we?

Lincoln’s top earner was listed as Dan Nlundulu on loan from Southampton for the first half of the season. (£333k). We’re not the only ones who get it wrong. Lincoln’s highest earning player of their own was Hakeeb Adelakun whom they picked up on a free from Hull a year ago and deemed he was worth a salary of £218k. After just 12 league starts he’s been loaned to the Gills for a season. For the record Maguire is on £177k p.a.

As ever I have digressed so perhaps tldr kicked in for some but I don’t give a toss. Go straight to the next bit if it is basically the 90 minutes only that interests you. Me, I find everything surrounding football fascinating (and often frustrating).

Oxford United 1 Lincoln City 2

Did I find the actual football fascinating? No I bloody didn’t. Did I find the actual football frustrating? You bet I did and some and then some more again.

It’s not the top six we’re looking at. Oh no. It’s the bottom four. Incredibly given how bad we’ve been so far this season – and we have been mostly bad – we’re still 19^th with Wycombe, MK Dons, Morecambe, Cheltenham and Burton below us in that order. Our next two league games are against two of those sides and if we cock them up as we’ve done so far there will be merry hell to play.

Some people were saying we had an easy start to the season and would have a lot of points on the board before we faced the better sides. Well we’re making a bloody good fist of screwing up against sides that certainly aren’t the better sides. No disrespect to Bristol Rovers and Lincoln. I’ll be honest in saying that I’ve got a grudging admiration for the way they’ve done it and both these team imho have deserved to beat us. None of the opposition we’ve played so far though have had me thinking they’re a really good side and will seriously challenge at the top. Except Derby perhaps.

I don’t know if Karl Robinson believes what he says post-match, even knows what he is saying or just says things to protect and big up his players, but if he genuinely thinks we’ve been the better team in every game we’ve played this season I’d put his level of delusion on a par with that of Donald Trump.

I’ve mostly been a supporter of Karl and at times have disagreed with his take on a game but this really pushed the boundaries.

Previously when I and many other supporters have not been happy, he’s turned it round. We’ve started many a season poorly and turned it round. But we’re still in League One.

I’ve not given up hope he’ll turn it round again but where will that actually take us?

This is his fifth full season as manager and we’re told he’s being well backed by the board. We can see that by the fact Cameron Brannagan is still with us on a new improved contract.

This being so I suspect my level of patience this season is rather lower than it has been in previous campaigns.

That said I’m working on a mind-set re-set. Telling myself at this early stage that it is going to be a long hard season so I just need to thoroughly enjoy the good bits when they come along. A rare away victory. A rare good result against a top side. A rare goal of quality that comes about after a sweeping move where the ball is passed swiftly from player to player and the finish is exquisite.  All this seems so very far away at the moment.

If we’ve really got ambitions to be one of the top 30 clubs in the country the improvement needed from where we are at the moment is enormous and it’s not just on the pitch, although the two come together when it comes to the numbers coming through the gate. A crowd just shy of 7k including 326 Imps screams average L1 team at best. I don’t sense there is any real belief amongst those of us that are turning up that this season is going to be a successful one. Perhaps we too have reached the upper point of our upward trajectory the way things stand and are slipping back down again.

This first half was as bad as anything I can recall for quite some time. As a threat going forward we were an absolute joke and it’s even worse when you are the home side and are supposed to be on the front foot dictating play. I can’t recall us having a shot worthy of the name until the 40^th minute.  That was a good Brannagan shot that went narrowly wide. By then we were a goal down. Soon after it was two. It was incredibly depressing. This only happens if something is very wrong and very wrong it seems to be at the moment.

So many of the boxes containing a list of bad things had a tick in them. These are things that we know about but don’t seem to have done anything to address. No pace on the flanks – although that’s probably unfair on Marcus Browne but the ball wasn’t getting to him as much as would have been ideal. Matty Taylor isolated and almost a waste of a shirt AGAIN. Build up play way too slow. No one or two touch football. Players not working to find space. Players not calling for the ball.

To make matters worse the defensive solidarity which had been a saving grace of sorts up to now, degenerated somewhat. Elliott Moore and Stuart Findlay have been very impressive in winning almost everything in the air.

Almost half way through the first period we went one down. There was a loose ball to be picked up in the centre circle.  Paudie O’Connor did the picking. A first time forward pass wasn’t controlled by Ben House or it just might have been a quality flick on to Jordan Garrick. He ran across Findlay who had popped out of the penalty area to have a nibble which brought no rewards. Garrick’s pass found Anthony Scully just outside the angle of the area who had time to take a touch before putting in a cross that was easy to put in the back of the net. We had so many players on the premises that might as well not have been there for all the good they were doing. The marking and closing down was atrocious. No one rushed towards Scully to put pressure on. Sam Long seemed more intent on pointing to the Lincoln player who provided the option of an overlap. I’ve no idea what Lewis Bate was doing. Just stood in no-man’s land. He was a huge disappointment. Serves me right for raving about him when he came on for 20 minutes against Cambridge. Here he looked too lightweight and also too slow, having the ball nicked off him quite easily. But that’s what happens when the whole team isn’t performing. Another negative box to be ticked. Smaller and less physical players in many areas of the pitch compared to our opponents.

Tom Hopper, the scorer, got between Elliott Moore and Steve Seddon to nod past Simon Eastwood without a challenge coming in. I also thought Eastwood should have done better. Having seen the ball was going over Moore’s head shouldn’t he have taken a step or two closer to Hopper?

If that wasn’t bad enough, in added time we had double the deficit to make up. Again we were architects of our own downfall. We had a throw deep in our own half. Seddon threw it longish. Taylor, who was surrounded by three red shirts as ever, was supposed to jump and win it against taller opponents. Of course he didn’t. Lasse Sørensen did. It was now again a case of battling for a loose ball. Scruffy, scrappy football. Although it can be a quality product at times L1 at others is far from it. When we aren’t good enough to play our football (and I’m not sure we have in our locker what we did last season) it’s then all about the battling and the grind to win matches.

Findlay waved a foot at that loose ball and sent it across field where it was there to be challenged for between Long and Max Sanders. There should have been no real danger but our man lost out and Lincoln had a spare man. How the **** does that happen? That spare man was Scully. He was allowed four touches and then a fifth with no tackle or block coming in. That fifth touch curled the ball past Eastwood from just outside the area.

There were boos at half-time and I would say rightly so. I did a very mild one myself, terrible fan that I am.

Our total pass count was 478 to Lincoln’s 278 but once more, don’t get me started. I’m not anti-playing out from the back and tapping the ball about between defenders per se but I think football may be moving on again. If you’ve got the players Pep Guardiola has at his disposal that’s one thing. They’re good enough to beat almost any press a team can throw at them. The further down the footballing pyramid you go it becomes a very different story. Forwards and midfielders all pressing and marking as one make it very difficult if not impossible for teams to play out from the back. I think the days of the big centre-forward who can battle and win a high ball knocked long and/or hold it up may come back. They’re incredibly rare at the moment and are not being groomed but why not. Football is about winning matches is it not? Thinking one step ahead.

We no longer seem equipped to play out from the back. There’s no player dropping in front of the back line, picking the ball up and looking to spray it forward. It’s almost as if keeping the ball in tight spaces, even dangerous ones, is a goal in itself for us. There was a short spell of play in the first half when we had the ball near the corner flag in front of the South Stand as we defended that end. Lincoln had loads of players on the premises making it really hard for us. I thought there were a couple of instances where we could have launched the ball, but no we played it about in intricate fashion, kept possession and many passes later had …… won a throw (or perhaps conceded a throw, I can’t remember) about 25 yards further up the pitch. Would have been a magnificent training ground routine but as a means of winning a game of football such as this I have grave doubts. But oh how some people clapped.

As the teams returned to the field of play for part two the announcer came up with his usual, “let’s make some noise for your Oxford United”. What do they want us to boo again I asked.

Without a shadow of a doubt we vastly improved in the second half and were the better side but the damage had already been done and as our finishing is woeful we ended up pointless. Billy Bodin missed what looked to me like a sitter and he’d not done very well in the first half either when set up well by Marcus Browne. He might get a goal or two if he keeps getting picked but a finisher he is not. And that header Moore had was a relatively easy chance wasn’t it? Of the other chances kicking towards the East Stand I remember was another Brannagan shot and a Browne free-kick that made it into the side netting.

So that’s another game where we’ve not been able to score from open play and we’ve now managed just one goal in 360 minutes of football. Some people use the stats of us having more possession and five shots of 15 on target to argue that we were unlucky. Being poor at putting the ball in the back of the net is not down to bad luck.

We did score a goal though, from the penalty spot. 100% the right decision as sub Kyle Joseph was having his shirt pulled as the ball came over from a corner and was still having it pulled when he tried to swivel and get a shot on goal. Brannagan delivered with meaning but his picking up of the ball and running back to the centre-circle in determined fashion made no difference and didn’t inspire a come-back.

Photo, Simon Jaggs

The sight of Browne limping off in tears put a massive dampener on the remaining minutes even though there was ample time for us to go on and win the game.

He’d been a bright light in a dark display and was really coming to life. Now he joins Sam Baldock, Yanic Wildschut and Josh Murphy on the injured list. I can’t find any information on the seriousness or otherwise of Browne’s injury or what’s happened to Murphy either. Each and every one has a history. We gamble and here we are. What percentage of our wages are being paid for personnel who are currently unable to perform the duties for which they are being paid? Not happy about this situation and as I keep saying I think a lot of it is of our own making. We take too many risks. That said I have total sympathy for these young men who will be desperate to make the most of relatively short careers and entertain us when they are physically able.

Time for my now perhaps customary desperate attempt at some positivity as I sign off.

Marcus Mcguane – he’s really starting to look some player. He’s really got himself fit and looks a top L1 player or better. Wish he would occasionally move the ball quicker though but he does look capable of running with the ball and causing problems for the opposition and we’ve not got many who are doing that at the moment.

On that note – Tyler Goodrham. A refreshing twisty turny thing.