By Nathan Jackson
December 30 2006

It certainly wasn't the most convincing performance from City but Jeff Hughes' goal meant a double over Wycombe. It was the first time that City had avoided defeat at home to Wycombe in the football league and means that the Imps end 2006 with a great total of 50 points.

Well another week and yet another victory for the Imps. Not many will realise this but other than the Darlington game, we’ve won every home game since that shocking game against Bury. Our home form hasn’t exactly been disastrous over the last few years but it’s been the main reason we’ve not finished higher in recent years but 8 wins out of 13 home games is better than a lot of people would have realistically thought during the first half of the season.

Without doing the relative research, I think I can safely say that no Imps side in history has reached 50 points before the turn of the year and that is some achievement in itself and a gap is starting to appear. The top 3 are slowly starting to edge away from everyone else and it just shows how inconsistent some of the sides below us are than when you look at last Saturday’s game against Peterborough, a win for them would have seem them level with us, now they’re 12 points behind us, now that’s an achievement.

Today’s game was far from a classic performance from the Imps and if it wasn’t for Marriott’s bi-monthly showing of fantastic goalkeeping, we’d have lost by quite some way. It makes a nice change for us to be the side to score with virtually our only chance, it’s certainly enough to us over the last few weeks, Chester being the prime example.

I can’t quite put my finger on why we weren’t our usual effective selves and I’d be really interested to see what our pass completion rate was because a lot of balls went wayward today, thankfully though there was only one that mattered and that lead to the goal. Maybe it was because the mud catching the ball so hopefully, with the traditionally perfect pitch at Macclesfield, we can get back to the passing game.

Now, I know some of you think I always look for something to moan about but I can’t surely be the only person to notice that our set pieces are utterly shocking. How many times have we seen a corner go out for a throw on the other side because there’s been no-one waiting at the back post where the ball is aimed for. That’s probably the only weak point of our games at the minute and if we can improve these, then we’d be absolutely battering teams each week.

Well that’s it for the 2006 section of this season and if the 2007 is anything like it has been so far, then we’re in for a treat.