Lincoln failed to make the expected step up in their attempts for a return to the Football League as a mostly dreary third season in the non-league yielded another mid-table finish. Gary Simpson managed to just about keep the team up after taking over at the tail end of the previous campaign and made some decent summer signings. The biggest coup proved to be Ben Tomlinson as his former protégée from his Macclesfield days scored the majority of the goals for the team annd proved a selfless and determined worker throughout the campaign. A promising first month of the season, with wins over promotion favourites Forest Green and Wrexham, raised the expectations among the locals that this could be a more special season. However, that proved one major false dawn as the Imps endured a real rough patch from September until the final days of 2013. They secured a mere three wins in a run of 19 games and they all came against sides in grave relegation danger. The football was absolutely abject for most of this period and the fans started to voice their disapproval. Simpson was focusing too much on keeping it tight and solid at the back while leaving Tomlinson to plough a lone furrow up front. The loss of Andrew Boyce in November removed the sort of defensive reliability needed for that system to work at least occasionally. Some particularly poor defeats, like the 4:1s at Kidderminster and Forest Green and a 5:0 loss at Plymouth in a FA Cup replay, along with a 5:1 drubbing at Halifax just before New Year’s Eve, really turned the pressure on the team. But they had something of a watershed moment a couple of days after that when they managed to frustrate their bitter rivals, Grimsby, to a 1:1 draw away from home. The players drew a lot of confidence from that result and really took off in the weeks and months to come. Some emphatic home wins removed any danger of being of relegation while the manager showed a bit more variety in his approach with the performances getting a lot better and more exciting. The team maintained the good tempo until the final games of the season, losing just one of the final nine games, and finished pretty high up the table given their overall performances in the season. The Imps are far too big a club for the Conference and cannot regard the season as a success but showed promising signs in the spring and can take a lot of encouragement from that and build a proper play-off charge next season with the right reinforcements as Simpson is the sort of wily operator that knows his way around the league and can get the most out of the players he has.
