Rob Bradley
Of the Red Imps Community Trust has his say on Lincoln City
IT’S not often you love a role or job so much you can’t wait to hand it over to someone else, however daft that sounds.
I have represented the Trust on the Lincoln City FC and Lincoln City Holdings boards for about three-and-a-half years now, and it’s been an amazing experience.
I’ve been able to compare it with the same role 20-plus years ago when the club was smaller, struggling, and surviving – just.
The Lincoln City of now is very different, of course. For an ordinary fan both periods have been a huge privilege.
The whole point of a Trust, though, is to give the opportunity to the members to play a part in how their club is run.
We do that in lots of ways through dialogue and so on.
The most significant involvement is through a democratic process to select our Trust representative and where the successful candidate then takes up our position in the club boardroom.
Whilst all our Trust bods enjoy the out-and-about active stuff, which mostly centres on fan engagement, we have to ‘future plan’ too.
This means attracting new people with new ideas, and we’ve started such a campaign to bring in new Trust board members and other volunteers.
Hopefully they like what we do, or think we can do better with their input. All good.
So it’s time to see if a new Elected Supporter Director is out there, and with nearly 6,000 members I bet you there is.
There’s some requirements for the role of course,
You need to agree with Supporter Trust principles, you need to ‘get it’ as far as Lincoln City is concerned, and you need to comply with some tests, like the EFL ones.
Most of all, it’s good if you think you can contribute in the Imps boardroom.
I don’t mean by this you tell Clive, Harvey, and Liam to shut up a minute while you lay out a revolutionary new proposal.
It’s really about maybe having some expertise in a specific area, or perhaps being good at helping set strategy or oversee a project. That sort of thing.
You’ll see more of our adverts about Trust involvement over the next few months, and we hope you’re tempted. You’ll be very welcome.
BOSTON United manager Ian Culverhouse insists his side “need to be better” after falling to a 2-1 defeat at Brackley Town on Saturday.
The Pilgrims found themselves 2-0 down inside the opening quarter of an hour at St James Park, with Zak Lilly and Morgan Roberts on target for the hosts.
Brad Nicholson got a goal back for the visitors on the stroke of half-time, but they couldn’t find an equaliser as they were consigned to a third defeat in four matches in all competitions.
Despite being pleased with much of Saturday’s performance, Culverhouse expressed his disappointment with the way his side are currently losing games.
“We’re killing ourselves at the moment, we’re putting ourselves out of games too early and too easy,” the manager told his club’s website.
“I can’t fault their effort, I thought we were superb, I thought we were the better team.
“Dominant after they scored their second, but you can keep being as dominant as you want, we’re losing games at the moment, so we’ve got to be better.
“I thought we were excellent. We moved them, we shifted them, we put enough balls in the box to score, but the reality is we’re losing games, and the way we’re losing games is very, very frustrating at the moment, because I haven’t come across a side that we’ve played that have actually earned one (a victory).
“We’re giving them away, we really are. It’s something that we’ve got to really stamp out.
“We need to be better, we really do. We’re losing games through the fault of our own.”
The result leaves the Pilgrims 11th in the National League North table, on 29 points from 21 matches played, two points outside the play-off places.
With their next league game not until the trip to face Scarborough Athletic on December 12, Culverhouse has vowed to put his players through their paces in training.
“We’ll work hard in those sessions,” he added. “It won’t be just a tick over, we’ll put some mileage into their legs, and make sure that when we come back and start again that we’re right on it.”