By Philip Priddle
Do you ever despair when professional journalists seem incapable of writing anything accurate about your club? In all probability, it will be a rare occurrence if your club is a platinum card-carrying member of the Premier League elite, where every morsel of information is analysed to the nth degree and posted seconds later to the public domain. Everything is accurate, current, and entirely in order.
On the other side of football's increasingly glittering and divisive coin, you find the likes of Lincoln City. The Imps have been very much in the public eye in 2017 despite their obvious shortcoming of not being in the Premier League. A breathtaking FA Cup run, their return to the Football League after a six-year absence, and the emergence of Danny Cowley as one of the brightest young managers in the game have snatched them from the brink of permanent sporting obscurity.
Yet the national media continues to be riddled with basic errors about the club. Only this week, one article celebrated City's return to the Football League after seven years, whilst another called them Lincoln City and stated categorically that they reached the last four of the FA Cup last season.
None of this would appear to present a significant challenge to anyone blessed with basic reading and research skills, yet the errors are numerous and entirely avoidable. For example, anyone requiring information about Lincoln City's last six years (not seven) can refer straight to Six Years In Purgatory: The Story Of Lincoln City In The Conference 2011-2017.
Journalistic inaccuracy is not why I wrote the book, of course, although correcting some of that would be a welcome spin-off. Publications about Lincoln City have been few and far between over the years, and have varied significantly in terms of quality. Since the club dropped through the Football League trapdoor in May 2011, an extraordinary story has been played out in this quiet rural backwater.
It is a story of desperate financial struggle, of footballing ineptitude, frustration and chronic failure. It could be the story of any lower division club falling on hard times, but this one has a spectacular and utterly unexpected ending: five years of relentless trial and tribulation blown away by the kind of season which exists only in dreams or the minds of rambling lunatics.
There may never be another story quite like it, and it occurred to me that it should be documented for future generations. The guiding lights were accuracy and inclusion: a driving obsession to identify every relevant fact and preserve it meticulously. It is there on the bookshelf for all time in case anyone feels the urge to read up on one of the most extraordinary periods in the history of this or any football club. It reveals exactly what can happen through complacency, mismanagement and incompetence, but it also offers hope to every club down on its luck.
Less than two years ago, Lincoln City faced oblivion over a £380,000 debt to the bank. Today the debt is history. City are back in the Football League with money to spare, a great young squad and manager, a state of the art training ground opening later this year and a new 15,000-seat stadium on the horizon.
Almost 6,000 fans have purchased season tickets, and Premier League clubs are circling for centre half Sean Raggett. But for all the astounding success of the last twelve months, perhaps Lincoln City's biggest achievement is that the club still exists.
