Image source, Getty Images. ByJohn Pakey. BBC East Midlands. 6 April 2026. 141 Comments. How has a club with one of the smallest budgets in League One won promotion to the Championship?. When just a solitary point was needed, Jack Moylan scored a 96th-minute winner to secure a 2-1 victory at Reading and seal promotion in style, clinching a place in the second tier for the first time in 65 years.. With five matches remaining, Lincoln’s next job will be to win the League One title and complete a historic campaign at Sincil Bank.. It has been a journey about more than just recent seasons. To explain it fully, John Pakey – a former sports editor of the Lincolnshire Echo – caught up with his former colleagues to reflect on a success story that has been 20 years in the making.. “We look at Lincoln City as a sleeping giant, is that fair?”. This question was being put to me by Danny Cowley, it was just after 17:00 on Wednesday, 11 May, 2016.. I remember the time and date very clearly as I had just pressed send on the back page of the Lincolnshire Echo. The headline declaring – “It’s a Dan deal: Cowley to be new Imps boss”.. It was my first conversation with the man who, alongside his brother Nicky, would go on to dramatically change the fortunes of the club.. I had secured my story through sources, not from him direct, so to hear him on the phone was a relief as that back page was now whirling around a press.. “Nicky and I really think that if we can get the city behind us, if we can connect, then it has real potential,” said Danny. I agreed, but we had to go back another 10 years to really see when it had last felt like that.. ‘Keith had an eye for a player like no other’. Image source, Getty Images. That was under the management of Keith Alexander, a man who would cement his place in the club’s history, bringing it out of the ashes of administration to back-to-back play-off campaigns in League Two.. “Before Keith, the gates were bad, 2,500 people turning up,” said Leigh Curtis, who took over coverage of Lincoln City for the Echo back in 2005.. “Off the pitch, the ITV digital crash left the club out of pocket and it went into administration. What Keith did saved the club.”. And what Alexander did was recruit well. Several players he found came out of non-league and in some cases went on to play in the Premier League – Gareth McAuley and Gary Taylor-Fletcher being the two main examples.. “His eye for a player was amazing, and that was his great strength,” added Curtis. “But he also knew he had to get the team spirit right.. “He encouraged them to go out and socialise, build that spirit. His saying was that team spirit was worth 50 points in a season.. “What that did on the pitch was create a very hard-working team, players who would graft for each other. Critics would say it was a long-ball team, I think Keith just made a team that was hard to beat.”. Alexander left to join Peterborough United in the summer of 2006 and died aged just 53 in 2010. Such was
