By Nathan Jackson
November 7 2010
It's certainly not going to be an easy game when Lincoln City travel to Hereford United for the FA Cup. Lincoln and Hereford, a.k.a The Manish Bashin derby, hasn't produced many classics in recent years, although it did see one stunning goal last season.
City and Hereford didn't meet each other until February in the League last season, and it resulted in Hereford comfortably beating City 2-0, Gavin McCallum scoring the two goals that convinced Chris Sutton to buy him. The return match in March was the first at Sincil Bank since the death of Keith Alexander, City comfortably won 3-1, with Matt Saunders in particular scoring a brilliant goal from 30 yards. Not bad for the Manish Bashin derby
Now, I know some are trying to figure out why I call it "The Manish
Bashin Derby".....it comes from the Football League show that was shown 24 hours after the game at Sincil Bank last season when Manish Bashin introduced the highlights by saying "Hereford made the short trip to Lincoln on Friday night".....even by the shortest route, Hereford's Edgar Street is still 145 miles from Sincil Bank, hence the term "The Manish Bashin Derby".
In all seriousness though, this will certainly not be an easy game for City. Any neutral will look at the league table and see that only one place and one point separate the clubs in the League Two table, but that doesn't tell the full story. Hereford looked like this season's Darlington a few weeks ago, sitting bottom by a distance and looking certain to go down, one sacking of a manager and a physio replacing them later and Hereford are scoring for fun. They won their first round game 5-1 and also recently won away at Stcokport 5-0.
Fortunately, City are finally starting to keep clean sheets and have only conceded eight goals in the last eight games....it may not sound impressive but believe me, it's an improvement on what it used to be. However, scoring is most certainly still a problem and even against a team from the Blue Square North, you'd have done well to find many opportunities that City created that looked dangerous, it was a good job that the defence kept Nuneaton's few chances to long range efforts.
I think this tie will depend entirely on what happens a week before in the League tie. The League game against Hereford could potentially see our third win in a row, something that would give City a huge confidence boost, but City could also be quite far adrift after that game if results over the next two weeks don't go out way.
