By theimps.tk
April 27 2006

Lincoln City visit Shrewsbury in the last away game of the regular season hoping to gain advantage over the chasing pack. Whatever happens against Shrewsbury, the Imps will guaranteed need a result agianst Rochdale next week but the Imps will be hoping for another maximum haul at Gay Meadow

Well we finally reach the penultimate weekend of one of the strangest seasons that I can remember. It all started back in August and 44 games, 14 wins, 20 draws and 10 defeats later, the Imps make what could possibly be the last, one and one of the hardest away trips of the season to Shrewsbury Town. There is no need to understate how important this game is as if the Imps do win and results go our win, we're as good as in the playoffs.

After struggling for most of the season, the Imps surprisingly see themselves on the brink of a 4th straight playoff campaign but unlike previous campaigns, this is definatly not a time to stumble and getting a win is vital to the Imps chances. Going into the last day needing a win would be a disaster for the Imps because we haven't won on the final day since securing promotion against Brighton in the 1997/8 season and the previous one before that was a 5-0 win over Torquay at the end of the 1995/6 season.

No matter what happens, the Imps are guaranteed to go into the last weekend with the pressure of getting a result to ensure that we fill that last playoff spot but standing in our way are a Shrewsbury side who themselves aren't out of the playoff race. City have a good recent record at Gay Meadow and have won on both visits since Keith Alexander returned as manager.

Yeo is still out injured but hopes to be back for the playoffs, if we make them. Forrester's renewed loan means he's almost guaranteed a first team place and to be honest, I wouldn't expect there to be too much change from the team that got a draw against Leyton Orient last week meaning the continued use of the 5-2-3 system

Who I think will start (Right to left)

Marriott

Beevers      Morgan    McAuley      McCombe   Hughes

Brown        Kerr

Green    M/Robinson    Forrester

 

Shrewsbury are a hard side to beat and their game at Sincil Bank proved that as the Imps battered them for 90 minutes but a mix of resilient defending and impressive goalkeeping kept the Imps from winning by a large margin as the Shrews only managed 2 shots on goal and the only one on target was a goal. The Shrews have had a good season compared to their previous 2 football league campaigns and for the 3rd FL campaign in a row, their final home game is against a team from Lincolnshire and the Imps will be hoping they have as much luck as the previous team (Scunny visited twice) did as a win secured a playoff place in 2002/3 and it secured automatic promotion last year.

Argubaly the main reason that the Shrews are up there is impressive young goalkeeper, Joe Hart who at the young age of 19 won a place in the PFA Team of the Year earlier this week and capped off a fine season which has seen the youngster linked to quite a few higher league clubs. Other than Hart, there aren't many players who stand out as spectacular and overall, they have a pretty average squad but if you have a good TEAM then it obviously does wonders for the team. Shrewsbury are similar to Lincoln 3 years ok, 1 extremely good player (Morgan for the Imps back then) and the rest were pretty average but worked well as a team and achieved things, which is what the current Shrewsbury squad are close to doing.

For a while though, it looked as though Shrewsbury might actually go down as they won just 6 games in the 2005 section of the season but results since then have picked up and they've lost just 7 times since the beginning of 2006 and a run of 4 wins in the last 7 has thrown in them into a playoff fight although they'll have to hope that results go dramatically their way in order to reach the playoffs.